Posts Tagged ‘Ruy Teixeira’

LinkSwarm For May 30, 2025

Friday, May 30th, 2025

This week brought not one, but gully washers to the Austin area, so now I’m fighting a war against a zillion millipedes climbing the walls to invade every nook and crevice of my home, so I’ve been spraying a lot of pesticide around windows. A Supreme Court win for Trump, lots of budget wrangles, a look at the burgeoning Democrat Party civil war, antifa finally gets investigated, and more Harvard-bashing from the Babylon Bee.

It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Winning: “Supreme Court Lets Trump Strip 500,000 Migrants Of Legal Status.”

    The Supreme Court on Friday sided with the Trump administration – allowing them to revoke temporary legal status granted to over 500,000 immigrants by the Biden administration.

    In a 7-2 vote, the court granted an emergency application filed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that ends the Biden program which granted 532,000 people from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua permission to temporarily live and work in the United States.

    Faster, please.

  • A look at part of the Soros network:

    This Part 1 report will focus on the George Soros-funded NEO Philanthropy which is funding and orchestrating a massive, nationwide illegal immigration scheme through NEO’s the Four Freedoms Fund.

    In the 2024 election, NEO Philanthropy’s Four Freedom Fund sought to raise $5 million to help illegal immigrants stay in the country in the event of a victory by Donald Trump.

    NEO Philanthropy
    Latest Tax Filing(s): 2022
    Budget (2023): Revenue: $167,648,220
    Expenses: $128,270,774
    Assets: $199,912,880

    A Capital Research report shows NEO Philanthropy and its advocacy sibling received $21 million from the Soros Network to support “advocacy on Latinx rights and empowerment,” change policy in North Carolina, register voters and fund get-out-the-vote efforts among “historically disenfranchised voters” (read: likely Democrats), and boost the Movement for Black Lives.

    The Four Freedoms Fund is a donor collaborative of NEO Philanthropy. The Fund primarily focuses on pushing left-of-center immigration policies, including “legalization of undocumented immigrants” through a path to citizenship and comprehensive immigration reform legislation. The Fund is critical of what it calls “anti-immigrant ordinances” created by conservative legislators, including deportations by U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    NEO Philanthropy (formerly Public Interest Projects) is a New York-based nonprofit that serves as a fiscal clearinghouse for left-of-center causes. The group serves as a vehicle for left-of-center foundations to pool resources, hosts donor-advised funds, and sponsors various advocacy projects.

    The organization is the fiscal sponsor of left-of-center entities, including the Funders Committee on Civic Participation, a voter mobilization group. Disbursing grant money remains one of NEO’s primary functions; NEO Philanthropy gave close to 60 percent of its total expenditures as grants.

    Inside Philanthropy described NEO as “an intermediary that doesn’t have its own resources for grantmaking.” The group receives funding from major left-of-center donors institutions including the Atlantic Philanthropies, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gill Foundation, the Pew Trusts and the Carnegie Corporation, among others. The organization and similar left-of-center groups that engage in “nonpartisan” voter registration have received criticism for appearing to favor the registration of voters exceptionally likely to vote for Democrat candidates.

    According to a 2016 report, an Obama administration appointee managed a fund that George Soros used to bankroll election-related activities likely increasing the number of “voters of color” and “improving odds” of electing preferred candidates.

    Karen Narasaki, a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, managed the Soros-backed NEO-linked Shelby Response Fund. Narasaki worked as a corporate attorney at Russia Collusion hoax conspirator Perkins Coie in Seattle.

    Much more at the link. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • “DeSantis Slams Republican Failure to Codify DOGE Cuts.”

    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis slammed Congressional Republicans on Tuesday over their lack of action on cutting the government waste and abuse identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

    Back in March, Congress passed the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, which maintained funding for USAID at the FY 2024 level, effectively extending existing funding for the purportedly “rogue agency” through September 30, 2025.

    The “Big Beautiful Bill,” which narrowly passed in the House of Representatives last week, reportedly includes $1.5 trillion in spending cuts, including the largest-ever welfare reform.

    But because it is a reconciliation bill, Senate rules limit the cuts to “mandatory” spending only, such as Medicaid and Food Stamps, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller explained on X. The DOGE cuts are overwhelmingly discretionary, not mandatory, so they are not addressed in the Big Beautiful Bill.

    Many conservatives have expressed disappointment that Republicans have failed to codify any meaningful cuts in wasteful discretionary spending, as identified by DOGE, in separate bills. Meanwhile, the director of the National Economic Council promised last week that “way more spending cuts” are coming later this year.

    In a post on X, DeSantis put the heat on Republicans to do just that, pointing out that DOGE Chief Elon Musk “took massive incoming,” which included “attacks on his companies” and “personal smears” while leading the DOGE effort. “He became public enemy #1 of legacy media around the world,” DeSantis wrote. “To see Republicans in Congress cast aside any meaningful spending reductions (and, in fact, fully fund things like USAID) is demoralizing and represents a betrayal of the voters who elected them,” the governor added.

  • “House Republicans plan to tee up its first Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut bill next week targeting foreign aid, National Public Radio (NPR) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) revealed on Wednesday.” Call me thick, but I just don’t see how Republicans can beat a Democratic filibuster without reconciliation, and I don’t think they can use that for this bill.
  • Ruy Teixeira 2002: Hispanic immigration will make Democrats the natural majority party of America. Ruy Teixeira 2025: Moderate Hispanics hate the Democratic Party and just about everything it stands for.

    Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.

    1. Hispanic moderates think the Democrats have moved too far left. In a 2024 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot and Blueprint, three in five Hispanic moderates agreed the Democratic Party had moved too far left on economic issues and about the same felt they’d moved too far left on “cultural and social issues.”

    2. Hispanic moderates are hawkish on illegal immigration. In the same survey, more of these voters thought “America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration” than believed “people around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.” Most Hispanic moderates endorsed a combination of border security and more legal immigration.

    Also in that survey, net support (support minus oppose) among Hispanic moderates for a proposal to “use existing presidential powers to stop illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border” was 59 points (63 percent to 4 percent). Similarly, Hispanic moderates supported by 36 points restricting “the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.” And they backed deputizing “the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing gang members and criminals living illegally in the United States” by 34 points.

    3. Hispanic moderates are tough on crime and supportive of law enforcement. Hispanic moderates supported by 53 points a proposal to “increase funding for police and strengthen criminal penalties for assaulting cops.” These voters even supported by 17 points a draconian proposal to “change federal law so that drug traffickers can receive the death penalty.”

    4. Hispanic moderates are opposed to Democrats’ stance on transgender issues. In a 2023 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot, voters were offered the following three choices:

    • States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
    • States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
    • States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.

    The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for trans-identifying children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is still enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet less than a fifth of Hispanic moderates (19 percent) endorse this position. Nearly twice as many of these voters endorse the strictest position: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. And 45 percent favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it four-to-one among Hispanic moderates against the Democratic position.

    5. Hispanic moderates want cheap, reliable energy not a renewables revolution. Cost and reliability is what Hispanic moderates really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey for AEI’s Center for Technology, Science and Energy, 49 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 25 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together that’s 74 percent of Hispanic moderates prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy. In contrast, just 21 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important. (Another 4 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security).

    Unsurprisingly given this pattern, it turns out that Hispanic moderates just don’t care very much about the climate change issue. In the survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 14th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, racial issues, and the problems of poor people.

    In terms of general energy strategy, when presented with a choice among three options—a rapid green energy transition, an “all of the above” energy policy, and emphasizing fossil fuels—Hispanic moderates strongly prefer an “all of the above” approach to energy policy including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear. Only a fifth support a rapid transition to renewables—actually less than support flat-out stopping the renewables push. Hispanic moderates’ preference for an “all of the above” energy strategy is reinforced by their answers to a binary question asking if they preferred using a mix of energy sources versus phasing out fossil fuels. The overwhelming judgement: 71 to 29 percent against eliminating fossil fuels.

    So Democratic Party policy falls into two categories for moderate Hispanics: The ones that are low priority, and the ones they actively hate.

  • The Democratic Party is indeed in trouble, and once Jeffrey Blehar gets past the requisite NRO anti-Trump sneers, he correctly fingers the social justice culprits.

    The Democratic Party is being pulled apart by horses: On one hand, the party is increasingly held in contempt by once reliable voter demographics (Hispanics, African Americans, working-class men) as out-of-touch elitists taking orders from the Ivy League and the progressive ultra-left. On the other hand — and just as relevantly — the party is crippled from within by that same hard-left faction, which has held the ideological whip-hand over Democrats’ social agenda for a decade now.

    These people are the problem. The inflexibly ratcheting social demands of the progressive activist/academic elite are the reason Democrats are in enormous trouble and will be even after Trump is forgotten. And these people are both practically and (more importantly for Democratic politics) morally entrenched within the party at all levels except the top strategic layer. They will not concede power easily, if at all. A civil war thus brews in the Democratic Party’s intellectual/activist wing against its reform-minded moderates. (Grab your popcorn.)

    I’m not sure that the entire cadre of “reform-minded moderates” with any appreciable role within the party itself could fill a high school basketball arena. Within the ranks of the DNC itself, I doubt they could fill a Denny’s. But the corrupt wing of the party has indeed come to the realization that the policies of the insane wing are so unpopular that the corrupt wing is in danger of longer being able to rake off its usual graft, hence the crisis. Too bad for them that they’ve essentially ceded the Party’s entire ideological apparatus to the insane wing, and the predominately over-60 corrupt wing has no viable way to change course or purge their own institutions.

    Another obvious example beckons: The hilarious plight of David Hogg, the whippet-faced punk set to be voted out of his newly acquired vice chairmanship at the Democratic National Committee next month for being a mutinous weasel, is emblematic of how the Democratic Party is currently consuming itself in internecine war. Hogg, recall, was essentially given the gig by a bunch of older, clueless Democratic Party grandees who voted for him in the hopes he would help bring disaffected young progressives back into the fold. Instead Hogg understands himself to be working not for the Democratic Party, but rather for the progressive movement — hence his announcement that he would use his position and powers to support primary challengers to insufficiently woke Democratic incumbents.

    The future looks even more grim for the Democrats for structural reasons. The 2030 census is expected to subtract a swath of House seats (and thus electoral votes) from California and New York, in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. While this bodes ill for remaining Republican incumbents in those states (who can expect to be brutally redistricted away by 2032), it bodes in many ways even worse for the remaining Democrats, who will be left fighting over the division of a shrinking pie.

    Understand: A significant number of those currently angry with the Democrats are angry at them for their failure to resist Donald Trump volubly enough, not for being too far to the left. These are the people Democrats absolutely must carry reliably as part of any victorious national coalition, given their preponderance within the party electorate. They will make demands accordingly. If anything, expect the progressive wing of the Democratic Party in its biggest states to lean even more progressive in years ahead as the moderates lose internal battles for position.

    There are no Democrat moderates, only Zuul. Assuming Zuul is a 400-pound, purple-haired tranny screaming about Gaza…

  • After five years of letting Antifa run wild in the Pacific northwest, the FBI is finally investigating.

    The FBI has indicated it will investigate the attack on a Christian group and the cops who came to intervene after a Memorial Day weekend melee in Seattle.

    After the attack and outrageous response by Seattle’s Mayor Bruce Harrell, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino issued this statement: “We have asked our team to fully investigate allegations of targeted violence against religious groups at the Seattle concert. Freedom of religion isn’t a suggestion.”

    I claimed in this must-read background story, Seattle Attack Offers More Proof That Antifa Thugs Are Just Democrat Anti-Christian Shock Troops, exactly what the title says, and that these anti-Christian attacks are nothing new. Further, after watching these groups for years, I can attest that the Seattle and Portland Antifa groups intermingle and help each other out, as Andy Ngo points out above.

    Hopefully the current investigation will also target their finding sources and start bringing RICO charges against the entire terrorist network. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “[Texas] House Passes Immigration Enforcement Bill Mandating Local ICE Cooperation. Lawmakers approved legislation requiring counties with jails to enter into immigration enforcement agreements with the federal government.”
  • “‘A Huge Day For The Nuclear Industry‘: Trump Signs Orders To Fast Track SMR Development & Deployment.”

    President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to fast-track the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors on Friday culminating a dramatic policy shift aimed at revitalizing the U.S. nuclear energy sector.

    Flanked in the Oval Office by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Trump declared nuclear power “a hot industry” and praised it as “very safe and environmental.”

    Burgum called it “a huge day for the nuclear industry,” and added, “Mark this day on your calendar. This is going to turn the clock back on over 50 years of over regulation of an industry.”

    These orders aim to strip away what the administration describes as decades of regulatory overreach that have stifled innovation and stagnated the industry. “America’s greatness has always come from innovation,” Burgum said. “We led post-World War Two in all things nuclear. But then we’ve been stagnated. We’ve choked it with over regulation.”

    The first of Trump’s executive orders directs the Department of Energy (DOE) to accelerate research and development, speed up reactor testing at national labs, and initiate a two-year pilot program for reactor construction.

    A second order clears regulatory hurdles for the DOE and the Department of Defense (DOD) to build reactors on federal land — efforts that will bypass the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) entirely by using the agencies’ own regulatory authority.

    Long overdue.

  • “US Tightens Screws: Jet Engine Parts, Semiconductor Tech Exports To China Halted.”

    The Trump administration has intensified the U.S.-China trade war by suspending exports of critical American technologies to China, including jet engine parts, semiconductor design software, specialized chemicals, and industrial machinery. The move follows Beijing’s recent decision to restrict shipments of rare earth minerals to U.S. firms. In a further escalation, Washington also announced plans to begin revoking visas for Chinese students in sensitive research fields.

    Snip.

    Adding to the trade tensions, sources familiar with the matter told The New York Times overnight that the U.S. Commerce Department had suspended certain export licenses allowing U.S. companies to supply engine parts and technology to China’s state-owned aircraft manufacturer, Comac (Commercial Aircraft Corp of China).

    Comac has stockpiled engines and parts in anticipation of potential trade restrictions. Still, over time, the move could significantly undermine China’s aviation. The company’s C919 passenger jet—its flagship jet to challenge rival Boeing and Airbus—relies heavily on GE Aerospace–Safran’s LEAP engines.

    Keep in mind that certain semiconductor parts had already been embargoed under Biden. A complete embargo of semiconductor parts is going to screw China’s semiconductor industry, as some of those parts simply can’t be sourced locally, to say nothing of losing access to trained maintenance techs, software upgrades, etc.

  • Ukraine claimed credit for two explosions in Vladivostok, which is on Russia’s Pacific coast and is a whopping 6,800km from Ukraine.
  • Saudi Arab wants you to know that he stands with Israel because Palestinians suck:

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • California starts backing away from letting boys compete in girls events. Timidly and halfheartedly, to be sure, but something vaguely resembling progress. Gavin Newsom’s secret 2028 presidential race polling must show that tranny pandering is killing him in any general matchup…
  • A bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent has passed both the Texas house and senate and heads to Governor Greg Abbott’s desk to be signed, but can’t take effect until federal law changes to accommodate it.
  • Trump to Harvard: Guess you won’t be needing these $100 million in federal contracts.
  • Somehow, MSNBC’s ratings have gotten even lower.

    MSNBC’s new prime time lineup, which debuted on May 5th, failed to connect with viewers in its first three weeks as the network saw its audience decline to near record lows – especially in the key 25-54 age demographic.

    Overall for May, MSNBC dropped 41% in the primetime demo and 34% in the total day demo compared to May of 2024. In total viewers, the network was down 33% across total day and 24% in prime time. MSNBC’s total day demo viewership sank to 49,000 average viewers and 73,000 in prime time – its second worst ever showing for a month behind January of 2025.

    Fox News was the only of the big three networks to see year-over-year gains for May, up 21% in total viewers and 22% in total day demo viewers compared to 2024. In prime time, Fox gained 23% in total viewers and was up 32% in the demo.

    CNN was down 24% in total day viewers and 27% in the daytime demo, while in prime time the network dropped 18% in total viewers and 21% in the demo. CNN’s prime time average came in at only 426,000 total viewers, compared to Fox News’s 2.5 million viewers and MSNBC’s average of 877,000 viewers.

    Why would you even bother to advertise on MSNBC? 79,000 is less people than fill a big college football stadium on a Saturday…

  • Speaking of MSNBC: “Jen Psaki, the former Biden mouthpiece-turned-MSNBC host, just watched her ratings plunge to humiliating new lows.”
  • Speaking of CNN, the red-pilling of Jake Tapper continues apace. His son is a gamer and high school football player who wants to be a policeman, so naturally lefty sorts immediately assumed he was a racist.
  • And despite his book tour, Tapper’s ratings are down as well. Why, it’s like viewers believe Tapper will continue to lie to protect Democrats in the future…
  • Evidently all those “old artisan shutting down their hand-crafted leather bag” business ads on Facebook are all fake scams to sell you cheap Chinese vinyl knockoffs.
  • 100% of studio headed by woman who won’t hire white people laid off.
  • The city of Austin wants to spend $5.8 million on art about hybrid plant women for an airport expansion.

    This is the same airport having delays because they can’t hire enough flight controllers. Maybe they should spent less on art and more on actually operating the airport.

  • But don’t worry: It gets worse! They’re about to hand $2.4 million to an artists that likes to include “Fuck ICE” in her work:

    (Hat tip for both: John Zoch.)

  • “InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that’s stronger than steel.”

    In 2018, Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, devised a way to turn ordinary wood into a material stronger than steel. It seemed like yet another headline-grabbing discovery that wouldn’t make it out of the lab.

    “All these people came to him,” said Alex Lau, CEO of InventWood, “He’s like, OK, this is amazing, but I’m a university professor. I don’t know quite what to do about it.”

    Rather than give up, Hu spent the next few years refining the technology, reducing the time it took to make the material from more than a week to a few hours. Soon, it was ready to commercialize, and he licensed the technology to InventWood.

    Now, the startup’s first batches of Superwood will be produced starting this summer.

    “Right now, coming out of this first-of-a-kind commercial plant — so it’s a smaller plant — we’re focused on skin applications,” Lau said. “Eventually we want to get to the bones of the building. Ninety percent of the carbon impact from buildings is concrete and steel in the construction of the building.”

    To build the factory, InventWood has raised $15 million in the first close of a Series A round. The round was led by the Grantham Foundation with participation from Baruch Future Ventures, Builders Vision, and Muus Climate Partners, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

    InventWood’s Superwood product starts with regular timber, which is mostly composed of two compounds, cellulose and lignin. The goal is to strengthen the cellulose already present in the wood. “The cellulose nanocrystal is actually stronger than a carbon fiber,” Lau said.

    The company treats it with “food industry” chemicals to modify the molecular structure of the wood, he said, and then compresses the result to increase the hydrogen bonds between cellulose molecules.

    “We might densify the material by 4x and you might think, ‘Oh, it’ll be four times strong, because it has four times the fiber.’ But it’s actually more like 10 times stronger because of all these extra bonds that get created,” Lau said.

    The result is a material that has 50% more tensile strength than steel with a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better.

    Some grains of salt are probably in order here, as this sounds just a little too good to be true, and there are always concerns about material longevity. But materials science is constantly advancing, so maybe this actually will pan out.

  • “Elon Musk Leaves Job Of Making Government More Efficient For Much Easier Job Of Sending Humans To Mars.”
  • “Man Clarifies That ‘Free Palestine’ Means Palestinians Should Be Free To Kill The Jews.”
  • “With Ban On International Students, Harvard Forced To Begin Accepting Students From Ohio.”
  • “ChatGPT Announced As Harvard Valedictorian.”
  • “American Students Unsure Who To Cheat Off After Trump Revokes Chinese Student Visas.”
  • “The Babylon Bee Would Like To Announce We Are Joining NPR In Suing The Government For Not Giving Us Millions Of Dollars.”
  • “California Unveils Massive New Escape Room Called ‘California.'”
  • “Nicolas Cage Launches New Streaming Service Nicolas Cage+ That Has Nothing But Nicolas Cage Movies.”
  • Finally, enjoy a Golden Retriever that looks like it’s playing Jean-Micheal Jarre’s laser harp:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

    • I’m still between jobs. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 9 Comments »

    LinkSwarm For January 31, 2025

    Friday, January 31st, 2025

    It has been a hell of a week. First my contract position ended, then I came down with cold that’s had me drag-ass and expectorating for a few days, and my vet found “concerning” results in the blood work on my dog Avery. To balance this out, Trump has been on an absolute #winning tear as of late.

    It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Looking to slash the federal government? From David Stockman (yes, that David Stockman) comes some places to start.

    Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):

    • 100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.
    • 50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.
    • 34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.
    • Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.
    • Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.

    We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.

    Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.

    Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.

    If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
    16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:

    • National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
    • National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
    • Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.
    • National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.
    • Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.
    • Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
    • OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.
    • Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.
    • Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.
    • National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.
    • Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.
    • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.
    • Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.
    • FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.
    • BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.
    • DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.

    Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.

    You’re just getting started…

  • This list of five ways the Biden Administration wasted your money will make your blood boil.

    #1 Joe Biden and his minions spent 15 million dollars to distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms” in Afghanistan…

    The Biden administration sent $15 million of taxpayer money in distributing “oral contraceptives and condoms” into Afghanistan, according to a private congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

    The award, earmarked by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) last July, transmitted the funds to Afghanistan.

    The money was part of a whopping $100 million package for the Middle Eastern country to support the “basic rights and freedoms” of women and girls who were living under Taliban rule.

    #2 Even more money was about to be spent on condoms for the Palestinians. It is being reported that the Biden administration “almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza”…

    Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced on Tuesday that Biden’s administration almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, which she called ‘a preposterous waste of taxpayer money!’

    ‘There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza!’ Leavitt shockingly claimed.

    #3 The Biden administration spent $10,000 for an “ice skating drag show” that was focused on climate change…

    The 2024 Festivus Waste Report found that the Biden-Harris administration spent over $1 trillion this year, including giving a $10,000 grant to “Beards on Ice” — an ice skating drag show on climate change put on by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization.”

    #4 20 million of our tax dollars were spent on a Sesame Street spin-off in Iraq that was designed to promote “inclusion”…

    Additionally, the Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 million on a Sesame Street spin-off show in Iraq, titled “Ahlan Simsim,” in an effort to promote “inclusion” and “mutual respect.”

    #5 This final example is the most sickening. 1.5 million dollars was spent to study how various species respond to motion sickness. In one of the experiments, holes were actually drilled into the skulls of young kittens. This is evil on a level that I don’t even know how to describe…

    About $1.5 million was spent experimenting how different species, such as young female kittens, respond to motion sickness.

    According to the report, researchers would strap kittens to a table, where they are spun around in several directions and have holes drilled into their skulls to keep them in place — “and it’s all being done with your money,” Paul writes in the report. “More than one and a half million dollars of it.”

  • Trump orders the federal government to drop the pronoun stupidity.

  • Remember Ruy Teixeira, the prophet of a “permanent Democratic majority” thanks to Hispanic immigration? Now he’s saying that Democrats have made themselves too incompetent to elect.

    The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.

    In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.

    Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?

    I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.

    Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:

    In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.

    The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.

    Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….

    Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

    Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.

    Instead of helping the Democratic Party, the massive influx of Hispanic illegal aliens is dooming it:

    Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

    And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:

    Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.

    Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.

    And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

    Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.

    Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:

    To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…

    In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.

    Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…

    Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….

    Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

    There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Another week, another Democratic Party official revealed as a sexual predator of children.

    According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, a 39-year-old Orlando man named Matthew A. Inman has been arrested and charged with “transportation of child sex abuse material.” If convicted, he’ll face between five and twenty years in jail. Though when you hear the details, you may agree with me that this doesn’t seem like nearly enough time behind bars for this guy.

    The press release continues:

    According to the complaint, between August and October of 2024, Inman received and saved several videos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to his phone. These videos depicted adults sexually assaulting young children. In October 2024, Inman traveled to Las Vegas and began talking online with an undercover law enforcement officer posing as the father of a 9-year-old boy. During this conversation, Inman expressed interest in meeting and sexually assaulting the purported child. He also sent CSAM videos to the undercover officer.

    The FBI obtained a search warrant for Inman’s electronic devices and residence. During the execution of the search warrant, Inman attempted to delete the evidence from his phone and hide in the attic of his house.

    A criminal complaint is merely a formal charge that a defendant has committed one or more violations of federal criminal law, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless, and until, proven guilty.

    This case was investigated by the FBI. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Varadan.

    According to Spectrum News 13, “Inman was arrested by the U.S. Marshals, and he is currently in the Seminole County Jail with no bond.”

    Fox 35 in Orlando reports that Inman worked for Visit Orlando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the manager of business affairs. He’s also been the treasurer for the Orange County Democratic Party since July 2023 and president of the Rainbow Democrats since 2021.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • The State Bar of Texas finally gave up on their lawfare campaign against Attorney General Ken Paxton.
  • A threat of a trade war causes the President of Columbia to back down in less than 10 hours about taking illegal alien deportees out.
  • Wow:

  • Never mind. “The mysterious drones spotted in northern New Jersey late last year were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration FAA and were not dispatched by foreign enemies of the U.S., the White House confirmed on Tuesday, ending months of speculation.”
  • Huge drone strike at Russia’s Kstovo Oil Refinery.
  • New York magazine literally crops black people out of pro-Trump and then complains about it being “too white.”
  • Sen. Mike Lee wants to fight the drug cartels by authorizing privateers to go after them.
  • Ex-New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez sentenced to 11 years in prison for gold bribery scandal.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • “Dallas City Council Member’s Re-Election Bid Halted by Term Limit Charter Amendment. The city secretary denied Carolyn King Arnold’s application for candidacy.” Bonus: Arnold is a convicted felon.
  • Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
  • “Trump to Cancel Student Visas of Pro-Hamas Protesters. The executive order is directed toward international students who participated in pro-Hamas protests.” If you come to America to get an education, do that. We have quite enough domestically grown Jew-haters on the left as it is; we don’t need to import any more.
  • Facebook/Meta is in talks to get the hell out of Delaware and reincorporate in Texas, largely based on what a Delaware judge has done to Elon Musk. Seems like Delaware incorporation doesn’t provide the slam-dunk legal protection it used to.
  • Demolition Ranch’s Matt Carriker is quitting YouTube to spend more time with his family.
  • If you’re a woman suffering from road rage, maybe you should avoid punching a man who can body-slam you into the ground.
  • A history of the Smith & Wesson Hillary Hole.
  • Critical Drinker calls Star Trek: Section 31 “Rock Bottom.”
  • He also played Still Wakes The Deep, and loved the atmosphere, but hated the linear gameplay. (More info on the game here.)
  • “Exhausted Media Begs Trump To Take A Day Off”
  • “Democrats Warn Trump Policies Will Lead To Skyrocketing Unemployment Among Child Traffickers.”
  • “Pete Hegseth Says All Women In The Military Are Now Nurses And Have To Wear Those Hot Matching Outfits Like In WW2.
  • “Trump Announces Plan To Make California A Part Of The U.S.”
  • “Liberals Briefly Pause Chanting ‘Death To Israel’ To Call Elon Musk A Nazi.”

    • As I mentioned last week, my contract position did end, so I’m between jobs again. Feel free to hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





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    Posted in Budget, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 4 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 23, 2022

    Saturday, July 23rd, 2022

    Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!

  • News flash: Universal basic Income makes recipients lives worse.

    The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.

    Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.

    The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.

    Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.

    For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.

    The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:

    • Less earned income
    • Less job satisfaction
    • Lower work performance
    • More financial stress
    • Less liquidity
    • Worse sleep
    • Worse physical health
    • More anxiety
    • More loneliness

    The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:

    “It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.

    Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”

  • The Democratic Party’s embrace of social justice lunacy has them sleepwalking toward disaster:

    The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.

    The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:

    Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.

    Snip.

    First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.

    Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.

    The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”

    Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?

    Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.

  • How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.

    Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.

    The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.

    The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”

  • Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
  • The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
  • “Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
  • Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
  • “Man found dead in Georgia house used by black nationalist communist group ‘Black Hammer.'”
  • Things the media doesn’t want you to know: “10-Year-Old Rape Victim’s Mom Is in Domestic Relationship With Child’s Alleged Illegal Alien Rapist.”
    

  • Soros-backed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon has hired the highest paid attorney in the country to fight against being forced to obey the law.

    Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:

    In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.

    Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”

    “The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”

    Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?

  • Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
  • “Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Kill someone in self-defense? GoFundMe will close your account. Get Darwinated after shooting at police? GoFundMe is A-OK with your family raising money off your dimwitted corpse.
  • “Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blames Dem-run cities for store closures.” As well he should. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Mario Draghi resigns as Italy’s prime minister after losing a no-confidence vote, which will trigger a new election.
  • How do we know Ray Epps is a fed? Because the New York Times is going to great lengths to defend him.
  • North Carolina town hires new woke city manager. Result: Town’s entire police force quits. Bonus: She was fired from her last job. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
  • “I’m a big fan of American airlines. They’re screwing us around a whole lot on this trip.” Plus: Monster Trucks!
  • The small part of Yellowstone national park where you can theoretically get away with murder.
  • An amazing 1949 Cadillac Fastback restomod.
  • Whoa!
  • Boing!

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, ObamaCare, Regulation, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »

    Ruy Teixeira 2002: Hispanic Will Make Democrats The Permanent Majority Party. Ruy Teixeira 2021: Not So Fast

    Sunday, October 17th, 2021

    In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis’s The Emerging Democratic Majority argued that demographic changes, especially high levels of Hispanic immigration, were going to transform the American voting demographic enough the Democratic Party would enjoy a natural majority for the foreseeable future.

    Now Teixeira has been reading the tea leaves again, and his new conclusion is: Not so much.

    And once again, the culprit thwarting Democrats is Donald Trump. Like The Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, Trump is disrupting the well-laid plans of secret hidden manipulators in ways they couldn’t foresee.

    Joe Biden in 2020 characterized Donald Trump as, among other things, an unapologetic racist who particularly detested immigrants. This strand of Biden’s campaign was supposed to have special appeal to Hispanics and juice their Democratic support.

    But that didn’t happen. Instead Hispanic voters went in the other direction, giving Trump after four years substantially more support than they did in 2016. According to Catalist, in 2020 Latinos had an amazingly large 16 point margin shift toward Trump. Among Latinos, Cubans did have the largest shifts toward Trump (26 points), but those of Mexican origin also had a 12 point shift and even Puerto Ricans moved toward Trump by 18 points. Moreover, Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Nevada (16 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

    Some details:

    1. Trump’s support was higher among Hispanic working class (noncollege) voters than among the college-educated. Biden carried Hispanic college voters by a whopping 39 points (69-30) compared to just 14 points (55-41) among the Hispanic working class.

    2. Hispanic Trump voters were 81 percent working class and just 19 percent college-educated.

    3. Within the working class, the less education Hispanic voters had, the more they supported Trump. Those with some college gave Trump 39 percent of their vote, high school graduates gave him 42 percent and high school dropouts gave him 53 percent.

    4. Pew breaks income into three broad groups: lower income, middle income and upper income. Trump’s worst group by far here was upper income Hispanics where he received just 28 percent of the vote. But he got 41 percent support among middle income Hispanics and 40 percent support among lower income Hispanics.

    5. Just under a third of Hispanic voters described themselves as conservative. These voters supported Trump by a lopsided 73-26.

    6. Over half of Hispanic voters (53 percent) were very or somewhat confident in Trump’s ability to make good decisions about economic policy. Those who were very confident supported Trump 77-18; those who were somewhat confident supported him 56-40.

    7. Trump support was highest among young Hispanic voters. Those under 30 gave him 41 percent support, those in the 30-49 year old age group gave him 38 percent; those 50-64 gave him 37 percent and those 65 and over the least at 35 percent.

    And the reasons why?

    What lies behind these unsatisfying results for the Democrats? One possibility, as I have previously argued, is that Democrats fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this voter group and what they really care about. Hispanics were lumped in with “people of color” and were assumed to embrace the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. The reality of the Hispanic population is that they are, broadly speaking, an overwhelmingly working class, economically progressive, socially moderate constituency that cares above all, about jobs, the economy and health care.

    For example, in the post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.

    In this context, it is interesting to note that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement did not rate very highly among Hispanics. In the national exit poll, Hispanic voters were split close to evenly about BLM, 47 percent unfavorable to 49 percent favorable. This significantly trails not just black voters, but also white college graduates, who rated BLM 61 percent favorable to 35 percent unfavorable.

    Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with BLM. In VSG data, despite showing support for some specific policing reforms, Hispanics opposed defunding the police, decreasing the size of police forces and the scope of their work and reparations for the descendants of slaves by 2:1 or more.

    An important thing to remember about the Hispanic population is that they are heavily oriented toward upward mobility and see themselves as being able to benefit from available opportunities to attain that. Three-fifths of Latinos in the national exit poll said they believed life would be better for the next generation of Americans. In the VSG data, these voters agreed, by 9 points, that racial minorities have mostly fair opportunities to advance in America, by 11 points agreed that America is a fair society where everyone has a chance to get ahead and by 20 points agreed that “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.”

    They are also patriotic. By well over 3:1, Hispanics in the VSG survey said they would rather be a citizen of the United States than any other country in the world and by 35 points said they were proud of the way American democracy works. Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy.

    It is probable that Democrats will continue to have problems with this voter group until they base their appeals to this group on what these voters care about the most rather than what Democrats believe they should care about.

    The Democratic Party’s current ideological core is distinctly uninterested in any issues outside the narrow orbits of their own desires (money and power) and obsessions (Critical Race Theory/victimhood identity politics, and completely reordering society in the name of the Successor Ideology). Understanding the needs and opinions of working class Hispanics is not only beyond their current capabilities, but is something they probably feel active hostility toward even considering.

    As previous pieces here have noted, the trend toward more Hispanics embracing the GOP has been especially pronounced in Texas. Open borders do not sell to the vast majority of American Hispanic citizens, who see widespread crime, disorder and general lawlessness from Biden’s decision to cease border enforcement, adding yet another current in the tidal wave of disaster Democrats are threatening to bring down on themselves in 2022.

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 7 Comments »

    Trump Red-Pilled Hispanics

    Saturday, May 8th, 2021

    For almost as long as I’ve been following politics, Democratic Party analysts like Ruy Teixeira have been confidently predicting a new, permanent Democratic majority based on the the demographic trend of rising numbers of minority voters, which explains why Democrats are so committed to keeping the spigot of illegal aliens flowing into America, as they viewed each as an Undocumented Democrat to be legalized via amnesty.

    Strangely enough, things always seem to get in the way of this “natural” Democratic Party majority. First the white working class started defecting, then came the 2010 and 2014 Democrat off-year election wipeouts. Now the good ship “Demographics Favor Democrat Destiny” has run aground on the rocky outcropping known as “Donald Trump.”

    There’s still lots of enthusiasm for Trump among Hispanics in Florida:

    The South Florida-based Patriotas con Trump, or Patriots with Trump, has held multiple rallies outside Mar-a-Lago, members send messages all day in their WhatsApp group, and a smaller group of 10 meet regularly to brainstorm ways to recruit more members — and help get Republicans elected in 2022. They’re also looking ahead to 2024.

    “We are Republican, but what we really like is what Trump promotes,” Laureano Chileuitt, the group’s leader, said. A physician, Chileuitt practiced neurosurgery in his native Colombia until he came to the U.S. in 2001.

    “That’s why we consider him our caudillo,” Chileuitt said, using the Spanish word for strongman. While the term has a negative connotation in the U.S., it doesn’t for Chileuitt. “It just means he’s ‘the leader,’ like Uribe,” he said, referring to Álvaro Uribe, the right-wing former president of Colombia. “We are anti-globalization and anti-communism.”

    Fueling such enthusiasm is the polarizing politics in Latin America, more options in conservative Spanish-language media, the presence of the Trump family in Florida and a state governor that remains a close ally of the former president.

    Today, many in Miami still speak about Trump as often as they did when he was president. Like Patriotas con Trump, many small grassroots groups that sprung up during the election period are still active.

    “Trump has not lost much support in this community,” Eduardo Gamarra, a Florida International University political scientist, said after conducting a poll for a private client.

    Trump and Republicans made substantial gains among these groups in the 2020 election. The biggest shift toward Republicans was among non-Cuban and non-Puerto Rican Latinos, and that’s where a lot of the enthusiasm is concentrated now.

    Venezuela’s ongoing crisis, Nicaragua’s human rights situation, Argentina’s return to leftist populism, and Peru’s runoff elections, with a socialist leading in the polls, all influence Latinos here and sharpen their focus on Trump.

    While few Latinos cite U.S. foreign policy when polled about voting preferences, Gamarra finds communities in Florida are being influenced by politics in their home countries.

    Trump is viewed by his international supporters, especially in Latin America, as a key ally in the anti-Communist fight. And in a state where Latinos have a strong connection to family and friends back home, the nexus between Trump and supporters of the Latin American right is strengthening.

    Likewise, Republicans made big inroads among Hispanics in Texas:

    The Democrats and the left try to make people believe they will flip Texas. They make gains in Houston, Dallas, and Austin, but not in the place most think would vote Democrat.

    Props to The New York Times for casting a spotlight on the Hispanic Republicans in south Texas, who took everyone by surprise in November.

    You would think the political leaders along the Rio Grande belonged to the Democrat Party. I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed they identified more with the far-left.

    Author Jennifer Medina wrote that when you enter the Hidalgo County Republican Party’s office you see a bulletin board with the local leaders, including Hilda Garza DeShazo, Mayra Flores, and Adrienne Pena-Garza:

    Hispanic Republicans, especially women, have become something of political rock stars in South Texas after voters in the Rio Grande Valley shocked leaders in both parties in November by swinging sharply toward the G.O.P. Here in McAllen, one of the region’s largest cities, Mr. Trump received nearly double the number of votes he did four years earlier; in the Rio Grande Valley over all, President Biden won by just 15 percentage points, a steep slide from Hillary Clinton’s 39-point margin in 2016.

    That conservative surge — and the liberal decline — has buoyed the Republican Party’s hopes about its ability to draw Hispanic voters into what has long been an overwhelmingly white political coalition and to challenge Democrats in heavily Latino regions across the country. Now party officials, including Mr. Abbott, the governor, have flocked to the Rio Grande Valley in a kind of pilgrimage, eager to meet the people who helped Republicans rapidly gain ground in a longtime Democratic stronghold.

    Pena-Garza chairs the Hidalgo County Republican Party, but “grew up the daughter of a Democratic state legislator.”

    Her father switched parties in 2010:

    But after her father switched parties in 2010, Ms. Pena-Garza soon followed, arguing that Democrats had veered too far to the left, particularly on issues like abortion and gun control.

    “Politics down here did scare me because you didn’t go against the grain,” she said. “If someone’s going to tell you: ‘Oh, you’re brown, you have to be Democrat,’ or ‘Oh, you’re female, you have to be a Democrat’ — well, who are you to tell me who I should vote for and who I shouldn’t?”

    Ms. Pena-Garza said she was called a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside — and a self-hating Latino, labels that have begun to recede only in recent years as she meets more Hispanic Republicans who, like her, embrace policies that they view as helping small business owners and supporting their religious beliefs.

    Pena-Garza declared, “You can’t shame me or bully me into voting for a party just because that’s the way it’s always been.”

    Females seemed to bolster the move to the Republican Party:

    Women who staunchly oppose abortion voted for the first time; wives of Border Patrol agents felt convinced the Trump administration was firmly on their side; mothers picked up on the enthusiasm for Republicans from friends they knew through church or their children’s school.

    Trump was certainly the catalyst. But it’s not just about Trump:

    Democrats, and maybe Republicans, would think the enthusiasm was only with former President Donald Trump. But evidence shows the people also consider local and Congressional elections just as important.

    Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez almost defeated Texas’s 15th Congressional District incumbent Vicente Gonzalez in November. She only lost by three points:

    “That was just what you do,” she said. She added that while she could not recall ever having voted for a Democrat for president, she had hesitated to voice her political views publicly, fearing that it could hurt her insurance business. “But I never understood the Democratic values or message being one for me,” she said. “And I am convinced that people here have conservative values. That is really who the majority is.”

    During her last campaign, Ms. De La Cruz-Hernandez relied heavily on local efforts, drawing little attention from the national Republican Party in a race she lost by just three points. Now she is focusing early on building support from donors in Washington. Already, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has named Mr. Gonzalez a “Frontline” member, an indication that it views him as one of the most endangered House Democrats. And in March, the National Republican Congressional Committee put Mr. Gonzalez on its 2022 “Exit List” and began airing ads against him.

    Hispanics are on average more religious than the average American, yet the hard-left victimhood identity politics leftwing ideologues currently steering the Democratic Party absolutely loath Christianity. Open borders are deeply unpopular with Hispanic Americans living along the border, and non-SJW Hispanics are heavily opposed to defunding the police. With a Democratic Party demonstrating new extremes in leftwing lunacy every day, is it any surprise that Hispanics are increasingly turning Republican?

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 4 Comments »

    John B. Judis Turns 180º, Proclaims Coming Republican Advantage

    Wednesday, February 4th, 2015

    John B. Judis is most famous for proclaiming that rising minority populations would make Democrats America’s natural majority party before too long, a theme he expounded upon in The Emerging Democratic Majority (with Ruy Teixeira) in 2002.

    Now Judis has taken a look at trends from the last few elections and said Whoa! Not so fast Jose…

    At the time, some commentators, including me, hailed the onset of an enduring Democratic majority. And the arguments in defense of this view did seem to be backed by persuasive evidence. Obama and the Democrats appeared to have captured the youngest generation of voters, whereas Republicans were relying disproportionately on an aging coalition. The electorate’s growing ethnic diversity also seemed likely to help the Democrats going forward.

    These advantages remain partially in place for Democrats today, but they are being severely undermined by two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college. These voters, and particularly those well above the poverty line, began to shift toward the GOP decades ago, but in recent years that shift has become progressively more pronounced.

    The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among a group that had tilted toward Democrats in 2006 and 2008: Call them middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called “the office economy.” In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000. (Obviously, the overlap here is imperfect, but there is a broad congruence between these polling categories.)

    The defection of these voters—who, unlike the white working class, are a growing part of the electorate—is genuinely bad news for Democrats, and very good news indeed for Republicans. The question, of course, is whether it is going to continue. It’s tough to say for sure, but I think there is a case to be made that it will.

    Never mind that Judis is a fairly hardcore Democratic Party partisan, or that some of his “advice” to Republicans is off-base. To basically reverse himself on his biggest prediction is rather like Charles Murray going “I’ve changed my mind, the Great Society welfare programs were great!”

    The piece is heavy on demographic shifts and very light on the causes of those shifts. He makes some noises on tax burdens (which I’m sure is true), but makes little or no mention of ObamaCare’s deep unpopularity, widespread opposition to illegal alien amnesty, or the counterproductive, alienating effects of the Democratic Party’s Social justice Warrior cadres alienating “core swing voters,” i.e. the “70 to 75 percent” of middle class voters who are white.

    Maybe Judis is using this as an opportunity for concern trolling (as when he suggests the GOP’s ideal 2016 nominee “soft-pedals social issues, including immigration”). But for him to not only say he was wrong before, but to come to conclusions that can’t help but alienate significant fractions of the Democratic Liberal Mediopolitical Complex, he must be seeing something in the data even more momentous than what he’s already describing, and he wants to get ahead of the curve…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans | 1 Comment »

    In Which Democratic Dreams of a Hispanic-Driven Blue State Texas Come A Cropper

    Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

    As fewer and fewer Democrats were elected in Texas over the past two decades, liberals would console themselves with the thought that demographics were on their side. “Just you wait, Hispanics will turn Texas back into a blue state.” Indeed, the likes of Ruy Teixeira considered the triumph of Democrats riding an ever-rising tides of Hispanic immigrants to permanent majority party status all but inevitable.

    But a funny thing happened on the way to Blue State Nirvana: Illegal alien amnesty failed, even with Democratic majorities in both House and Senate, depriving Democrats of what they assumed were certain Democratic voters. And thanks to both the recession and various state-level illegal alien measures in places like Arizona and Alabama, illegal aliens are now leaving the United States faster than they’re entering it.

    Worse still for Texas Democrats, Republicans suddenly became successful at wooing Hispanic voters and recruiting high profile Hispanic candidates, many of whom won.

    Now fast forward to 2012. After the Ricardo Sanchez’s withdrawl from the senate campaign, there are now absolutely no Hispanic Democrats running a statewide race in Texas this year. As horrible and lackluster a candidate as Sanchez was, at least you could see him protecting down-ballot races. But now Republicans will have at least one Hispanic (incumbent Judge Elsa Alcala of Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Place 8) and as many as three (including incumbent Judge David Medina in Texas Supreme Court Place 4), one of whom, Ted Cruz, could be the top statewide name on the ballot.

    Hell, even the Libertarians (Texas Railroad Commission Place 2) and the Greens (U.S. Senate) managed to find Hispanic candidates to run statewide. That’s a major Hispandering failure for the Texas Democratic Party. And to add insult to injury, by failing to run a candidate for Railroad Commission Place 2, where the Greens do have a candidate, Democrats have pretty much ensured that Greens will continue to qualify for automatic ballot access (and thus continue to leach liberal votes away from them).

    In an ideal world, people would choose all their candidates based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. In the real world, ethnic identification does affect voting patterns. Even a few percentage points of Hispanic voters crossing the aisle to vote for Cruz rather than straight-ticket Democratic might be enough for Republicans to pick up a handful of down ballot races.

    And that dream of a Blue State Texas grows still more distant.

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | 2 Comments »

    In Which I Come Perilously Close to Defending Lloyd Doggett

    Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

    Paul Burka has a post up in which he basically makes two arguments:

    1. Republicans are trying to Gerrymander white Democrats out of Congress; and
    2. “Almost no one has done as much damage to the Democratic cause” in Texas as Lloyd Doggett.

    He is mistaken, to differing degrees, in both beliefs.

    As for the first, Republicans are trying to Gerrymander as many Democrats as possible out of their congressional seats, white, black, Hispanic or purple, just as Democrats ruthlessly Gerrymandered Republicans out of congressional seats when they had control of redistricting. (Remember, Texas never had as many as three Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time until James M. Collins joined George H. W. Bush and Bob Price in 1969, despite Texas voters preferring Republican Presidential candidates in 1928, 1952, and 1956.) It’s just that the Voting Rights Act makes it so much easier to do it against white Democrats than minority Democrats.

    As for the second, anyone who has been reading this blog for any appreciable length of time should realize that I have no particular fondness for Rep. Doggett. However, laying the lion’s share of the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline in Texas at the feet of Doggett’s unsuccessful Senate campaign is both misguided and deeply ahistorical.

    First of all, it was a lot less obvious in 1984 that Doggett was too liberal to win (though he was) than the fact that nobody was going to beat Phil Gramm. After Democrats threw him off the House Budget Committee for supporting the Kemp-Roth tax cuts and co-sponsoring the Gramm-Latta budget reconciliation bill, Gramm resigned from his House seat and ran for it again as a Republican, winning overwhelmingly and turning himself into a folk hero for doing so. In the Republican primary he creamed Robert Mosbacher, Jr. and Ron Paul, and then thumped Doggett by 900,000 votes. Nobody was going to beat Gramm that year, even if Kent Hance had managed to defeat Doggett. And remember that after losing to Doggett in the Democratic Primary, Hance switched to the Republican Party the very next year. Even back then, it was apparent that conservatives had no future in the Democratic Party.

    Further, fingering Doggett as the cause of the Texas Democratic Party’s decline ignores the pronounced decline in the fortunes of the Democratic Party in every state south of the Mason-Dixon line over the last 32 years, as the so-called “Reagan Democrats” have fled the party in droves in both the South and Midwest thanks to its unwavering drive for bigger government and higher taxes. That can be laid at Doggett’s feet only insofar as he was one of several hundred Democratic elites pushing their party relentlessly left, no matter the electoral cost.

    And as for Burka’s starting that “How could [Doggett] have had so little self-awareness as to not know that he had was too liberal to win a statewide race?”, two points:

  • There’s a reason they have elections: you never know with 100% surety how they’ll turn out until they actually occur. Remember the infamous Newsweek poll that had Walter Mondale leading Reagan by 18 points right after the Democratic National Convention? Here’s another way to ask the question: “Shouldn’t Bill Clinton have known that Bush was invulnerable when he got into the Presidential race in 1991?” Nor did Doggett’s liberalism keep him from being elected to the Texas Supreme Court in 1988.
  • Second, not recognizing that Democrats have become too liberal for the general electorate is by no means limited to Doggett; indeed, it is arguably the defining characteristic of the modern Democratic Party. For years they’ve been listening to the likes of John P. Judis and Ruy Teixeira proclaiming them the country’s “natural majority party,” and there was no shortage of Democratic triumphalism confidently predicting how the Republican Party was “finished” after the 2008 election, and how well Democrats were going to do in 2010 once voters realized how awesome ObamaCare was. The comforting, anesthetizing Liberal Reality Bubble conspires to let them continually “get high on their own supply,” managing to convince themselves that America the Liberal is just around the corner. Even today, even in Texas: just look at all those members of the statewise MSM lamenting that Republicans are actually following the voting public’s wishes by shrinking state government rather than listening to them and their liberal friends and raising taxes.

    • There are numerous reasons why the Texas Democratic Party has gone from the overwhelming majority party in Texas to a rump minority party, the biggest one being that their misguided policies of big government liberalism are objectively wrong, financially ruinous and extremely unpopular. But Doggett is only an outstanding exemplar of the problem, not the cause of it.

    (PS: Also remember that in 1992, Burka was blaming the Texas Democratic Party’s decline on Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to seriously contest the state against Bush41.)

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

    The Magic of Self-Delusion (or Why Nancy Pelosi Would Rather Die Than Let You Keep Your Own Money)

    Monday, December 13th, 2010

    The deal Obama struck to extended all the Bush tax cuts is good for America, and also good for the Republican Party. When it was struck, however, the liberal howls of outrage made me think of one other outcome which, while not as good for the nation, would be even better for Republicans: If Nancy Pelosi blocked the deal, the Bush tax cuts (and long-term unemployment) temporarily lapse until the new Republican House takes over in January, at which point they pass a tax cut extension at least as strong as the Obama deal, and probably stronger. So in order to make the point how opposed Democrats are to letting rich people (or “rich” people) keep their own money, they’re willing to let the long-term unemployed stop getting checks for a month (and probably longer), delay economic recovery at least that long, let Republicans pick up an even bigger victory and take all the credit for the deal, make Obama look weaker and make the Democratic Party in general, and Pelosi’s House Democrats in particular, look even more petulant, shrill, and extreme.

    That appears to be exactly what’s going to happen. It’s like some perfect storm of liberal fail.

    The reasons why House Democrats are undertaking such counterproductive and self-destructive behavior probably requires the insights of a psychiatrist more than a political scientist. In the 2010 elections, voters rejected the liberal agenda about as thoroughly as any domestic political agenda has been rejected in our lifetimes. After two years of trying to push the most liberal agenda since LBJ’s “Great Society” expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s, Democrats suffered massive losses, most dramatically in the House, for a switch of 63 seats. For a graphic depiction of how thoroughly liberalism has been rejected, take a look at this Real Clear Politics map of incoming House seats:

    Not only are liberals unwilling to consider why their agenda was rejected by voters, they’re unwilling to even consider that their agenda was rejected. Rather than face up to that unpleasant fact, the nutroots have embraced a far more psychologically satisfying (if political suicidal) explanation for their tidal wave of defeats: Democrats lost the 2010 Election because they just weren’t liberal enough:

    I’m sure I could come up with 10-15 other examples. It’s like that episode of The Critic where Jay Sherman remembers being rejected by a woman he was trying to pick up: “Eww, I don’t like that memory at all! Let’s look at it again through the magic of self-delusion!” All those congressmen lost because they just weren’t as awesomely liberal as I am! High five! Inside the liberal reality bubble, the Democratic Party’s biggest mistake was getting Blue Dog Democrats to run in marginal districts in the first place, and if they had just run people with positions closer to Nancy Pelosi or Alan Grayson in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania, they would have done better.

    Of course, outside the liberal reality bubble, this idea is a laughably naive exercise in vainglorious wish fulfillment. It’s also easily disproven. Take a look at the contrasting fates of Tom Perriello and Jason Altmire.

    Perriello was the golden boy Democratic freshman Representative from Virginia who was not only the darling of liberals, but also loftily declared that he would rather vote for ObamaCare and be defeated than vote against it and be re-elected. Democrats pulled out all the stops to save his seat, sending him $1.6 million over a 10-day period and having Obama appear personally on his behalf. If the nutroots theory that liberals just needed a candidate worth fighting for to lure them to the polls to assure victory were correct, Perriello should have been a shoe-in. He lost.

    Altmire, by contrast, was one of those loathsome “Blue Dog Democrats” that so many liberals feel are merely Republicans in disguise. He voted against ObamaCare. If liberal theories were correct, disheartened liberals should have assured his defeat. He won in a year that fellow Blue Dogs who voted for ObamaCare were being slaughtered.

    So the current Pelosi-lead liberal temper tantrum is impossible to explain given the objective political needs of the Democratic Party. However, it’s all too easy to explain given the psychological needs of liberals.

    For years liberals have believed that majority status (like The New York Times and black voters) was their unquestioned birthright. Never mind that between 1968 and 2004, a Democratic Presidential candidate had topped 50% of the popular vote exactly once (the post-Watergate Jimmy Carter, who managed to garner a whopping 50.08% of the popular vote in 1976). For them, Republican victories were aberrations from the supposed norm. They truly believed that America was a “center-left” nation, despite polls consistently showing twice as many Americans identified themselves as conservatives rather than liberals. They believed people like John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira who assured them Democrats were the natural majority party, and would take over their natural role as lords of the earth any day now.

    And then the 2006 and 2008 election seemed to confirm the theory. Yes! This was it! This was their moment! Finally all of their dreams would come true! Obama was one of them, and with the House and Senate firmly in Democratic control, he would completely replace all the intolerable policies of his predecessor, “that idiot Bush.” He would end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, close down Guantanamo Bay, legalize gay marriage, use Keynesian economics to fix the economy, and nationalize health care. The liberal moment had arrived at last. It was so close they could taste it.

    But a funny thing happened on the way to the liberal nirvana. What the rest of us call “real life,” and what liberals attributed to an ever-expanding cast of villains (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Rasmussen Reports) they lumped together as “the right-wing noise machine” inexplicably rose up to thwart their righteous will. The economy stayed broke, and if the Stimulus did anything it made it worse. The Tea Party happened. Cap-and-Trade went down in flames. Obama figured out that Bush’s anti-terror policies weren’t bad at all now that he was the one who had to deal with the problems. Democrats managed to pull the Zombie ObamaCare over the finish-line despite widespread opposition, but it was a far cry from the glorious platonic idea of a fully nationalized, single-payer system that existed in their mind’s eye (and nowhere else). Then the voters, the same voters liberals believed in their heart of hearts was naturally liberal, rejected them. They were like a football team a mere quarter away from winning the Superbowl, only to have the opposing team rack up three touchdowns on them in the last five minutes. How can this be happening? What did I do to deserve this?

    When a party gets walloped in an election, usually it takes time to reflect on why voters might have rejected its message, and what parts of that message (and the party) need to be changed. If you’ve seen All That Jazz (and if you haven’t, you should; it’s a great movie), then you’re probably familiar with the Kubler-Ross grief cycle: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Obama has moved on to at least the third stage, but House Democrats and the nutroots can’t get past the first two.

    Conservatives have many interests that might supersede politics: Family, jobs, religion. But for many liberals, the political is personal. As far as they’re concerned, there’s Good (represented by Big Government run by liberals and doing the things liberals want it to do), and there’s Evil (big business (unless its unionized), rich people (unless they went to the right schools), Fox News, etc.). They believe the same things all their Facebook friends and newspapers and TV shows and NPR agree with! It’s inconceivable to them that people of good will might disagree with them.

    After all, they’re Good! The other side is Evil! That’s why they write books with names like What’s Wrong With Kansas? rather than Why Can’t We Convince Kansas To Embrace Higher Taxes and Bigger Government? They’ve spent the last 20-years believing that voters are liberals, so it’s impossible that voters rejected liberalism itself. That would be tantamount to voters saying they rejected them personally. That’s unpossible! After all, they’re awesome! No, this could only have been happened because the voters have been tricked. Liberalism didn’t lose, liberalism was stabbed in the back. Hence the hunt for traitors and scapegoats that snatched away their prize at the last moment.

    To actually listen to what voters were telling them would mean abandoning the worldview that they’ve clung to so fervently for so long. Thus every bit of cognitive dissonance only makes them cling more fervently to the belief that voters haven’t, didn’t, couldn’t reject liberalism itself. After all, they’re awesome, aren’t they? Aren’t they? Voters sent them a message good and hard, but they have to deny it, because their denial is all they have left. Liberalism can never fail, because whenever it appears to, then ipso facto it wasn’t really liberalism that was failing, just like Communist apologists claim that all those failed Communist states weren’t really Communist, because communism never fails inside the platonic fantasyland of their Marxist imaginations.

    And into this seething cauldron of anger and denial comes Obama, blithely announcing the deal to extend the Bush Tax Cuts. After all, Obama still has to govern the nation for the next two years. Clearly the economy is isn’t responding to Obamanomics, so something else needs to be done. And if the Bush Tax Cuts expire, Obama knows that Democrats are the ones that will get the blame for the biggest tax hike in history. So he cut the best deal he thought he could, knowing he would have even less leverage after the Republican House took over in January.

    In essence, Obama was saying that voters had indeed rejected liberalism. He was ruining their denial! Here was their traitor at last: Obama the secret Republican.

    So the House, under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi, decided to stand and fight on the only issue that seems to unite their base: Their hatred of the wealthy, and their love of other people’s money. The idea that money might belong to the people that actually earned it, rather than the federal government, fills them with rage. Here was their line in the sand: We have to screw the rich, even if it means screwing the poor and the middle class in the process! Even if it makes them more unpopular. Even if the Republicans will just pass a deal even less to their liking in January. So they have to oppose extending the Bush tax cuts, even though it will make the rest of the nation think they’re even more petty, vindictive, and out-of-touch than they already did. When it comes to preserving their wounded egos, rationality goes out the window. If it comes down to voters rejecting liberalism, or liberals rejecting reality, then to hell with reality. It’s no longer about policy, it’s about pride.

    And pride goeth before a fall.

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    Posted in Democrats, Economics, Elections, ObamaCare, Republicans | 2 Comments »

    Gentlemen, Your Crow

    Sunday, January 24th, 2010

    Given the huge upheaval in the political landscape following Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts senatorial race, I thought it was time to revisit what many in the liberal punditocracy were saying following Obama’s victory in 2008. There may very well have been some liberal commentators advising caution and restraint, least liberal ambitions and hubris lay the Democratic party low. However, I don’t remember any of them. What I do remember is numerous notables bandying about phrases like “the Republican Party is finished” and “permanent progressive majority.” Let’s exhume that commentary from its dusty vaults (some over a year old; very dusty indeed in Internet years) and see who might be dining tonight in Hell on a generous, tasty helping of fricasseed crow.

    For example, here’s The New Republic‘s John B. Judis in an article entitled “America the Liberal” published November 19, 2008 explaining how Obama’s election heralded a fundamental realignment in American politics:

    If Obama and congressional Democrats act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, many of the measures necessary to combat today’s recession will also help ensure long-term Democratic electoral success. Many Southerners remained Democrats for generations in part because of Roosevelt’s rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lure these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats’ future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.

    -snip-

    The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. And, just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has pushed aside the culture war of the last decades. It simply wasn’t a factor in the presidential election.

    If, however, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow–adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout–they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves.

    Or alternately, ObamaCare could doom that same realignment in less than a year after he took office. And of all the complaints about the Obama-Reid-Pelosi policy initiatives that Massachusetts voters voiced, I’m pretty sure that “going too slow” wasn’t among them. (Also, I think Sarah Palin and company might take issue with the assertion that the culture war “simply wasn’t a factor in the presidential election.”)

    For another example, take Judis’ sometimes-collaborator, liberal demographer Ruy Teixeira, who has been predicting a “permanent democratic majority” for about as long as I can remember. In March 2009, his study “New Progressive America: Twenty Years of Demographic, Geographic, and Attitudinal Changes Across the Country Herald a New Progressive Majority” had this to say:

    “At this point in our history, progressive arguments combined with the continuing demographic and geographic changes are tilting our country in a progressive direction—trends should take America down a very different road than has been traveled in the last eight years. A new progressive America is on the rise.”

    Sunset seems to have come remarkably quickly for that “new progressive America.”

    For the wisdom of another old Democratic party hand, let’s see what Robert Shrum (who managed just about every losing Democratic presidential campaign in living memory) had to say in The Week on September 22, 2009 about the political climate:

    “After this summer of discontent, Republicans think they can ride a wave of bitter tea to electoral victory. Once the tide runs out, they will be left high and dry. After health reform passes, probably with the help of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Republicans will crawl out of their hole to assail it in the campaigns ahead as ‘socialism’ or worse.”

    With such vaunted prognostication skills, I can’t imagine how Schrum’s campaigns could possibly have failed.

    The day after the 2008 election, Dan Conley of prominent left-wing blog MyDD proclaimed the “Death of the Center-Right Myth”:

    “The CRM is dead. Long live the New Liberal America.”

    However, he tempered his prediction with this: “Liberalism succeeds when Americans feel their faith in government restored. It won’t happen overnight … it’s a process that will probably outlive the Obama administration.”

    Not only did Obama not restore America’s “faith” in government, the project itself didn’t make it a fourth of the way through Obama’s term.

    Here’s another MyDDer, Todd Beeton, on November 9, 2008, saying that Americans had come around to the Democrat’s views on the virtues of big government, saying “Republicans Should Keep Running Against Big Government & Higher Taxes: That would be awesome.”

    Well, Mr. Beeton, it appears that Scott Brown took your advice. I don’t think he garnered the results you were expecting.

    (Confession: I went looking for similarly clueless pronouncements among the more prominent ranks of the Daily Kos Kids, and wasn’t able to find them, possibly because in the weeks after the 2008 election they seemed completely obsessed with ranting against the unimaginable perfidy of Joseph Lieberman.)

    Here’s a story called “Requiem for the Republican Party” by a Mike Whitney (a self-proclaimed Libertarian) on a site called The Market Oracle on May 6, 2009. It’s, um, somewhat less than oracular:

    “The poor GOP isn’t really even a party anymore; it’s more like a vaudeville troupe scuttling from one backwater to the next performing the same worn slapstick. They’ve simply become irrelevant, a ‘non-party’ that no one pays much attention to apart from the occasional zinger on the Daily Show or Letterman. In truth, the GOP is so deeply-traumatized from their shocking fall from power, they’d probably benefit from a spell on the couch. Perhaps if they spent a few weeks in therapy, they’d see what a mess they’ve made of everything….The Republican party is finished. Stick a fork in it.”

    I don’t think I’ll be taking stock-picking advice from Mr. Whitney anytime soon.

    In the more obscure corners of the web, take a look at the retrospectively hilarious map that one Dan Chmielewski offers up from Gallup on a site called The Liberal OC. It features Texas as a “competitive state” and Oklahoma as a “leaning Democratic” state. You know, the same Oklahoma that had just gone for McCain over Obama by 66% to 34%. It also notes that Massachusetts is the second most liberal state in the union.

    How quickly things change.

    Finally, it should be noted that it’s not only liberals who believed Republicans would be losing for the foreseeable future. Take perhaps the most singular example of that rarest of species, the “Pro-Obama Conservative,” New York Times columnist David Brooks, who proclaimed that “Traditionalists” would lead the party to defeat until “Reformers” (i.e., people who act, talk, and think precisely like urbane, mannered moderates like David Brooks) finally took control. “The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government.” Mr. Brooks further states (and this is a real quote, not an Iowahawk parody) that “They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.”

    Heaven forfend that sensibilities be insulted! Why if they continue to do that, all they can hope to achieve is seizing Ted Kennedy’s old seat! Their failure is assured.

    Gentlemen, dinner is served:

    Postscript: Some may consider all the above a blatant case of schadenfreude. Well, yes. But that’s not the only reason to post it.

    First, when your political opponents say something amazingly stupid, you have to call them on it. There’s a small chance they might learn better, and a larger chance that the populace at large will start to discount their opinions once they discover just how demonstrably divorced from reality those opinions are.

    Second, I wanted to demonstrate how easy it was, in the flush of victory, to make unwise, sweeping statements that are very likely to look quite foolish at some point in the future. Generally, statements about the “unstoppable” electoral rise of one political faction or another (or, to use that hoary old chestnut of the left, “historical inevitability”) are going to be proven wrong sooner or later. There are no permanent political victories in a democratic society. It is possible for individuals (or even, as the Whigs found out, entire political parties) to lose so badly they never recover, but the game goes on. In this light, extrapolating Scott Brown’s win to proclaim the inevitability of widespread Republican gains this November would be equally foolish and ill-advised. Such gains now look entirely possible, especially if Republicans, tea party members, conservatives, etc. are willing to put in the time, effort, and hard work to make it so, but they are by no means inevitable. Or, to paraphrase Instapundit: “Great win, kid. Now don’t get cocky.”

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