Rick Perry vs World

04 September 2012

No Easy Day

Tonight I read "Mark Owen"'s No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden, which is #1 on Amazon's best sellers.

It is about what you'd expect it to be: half is the author's thoughts SEAL training and half recounts the day of the May 2, 2011 raid. Impressively, he managed to sleep for most of the 90 minute helicopter ride from Afghanistan to bin Laden's compound.

Owen says he wrote the book to engage the next generation of SEALs, and no doubt he did that. But the book makes it pretty clear that he wanted to set the record straight about the raid and the SEALs. The SEAL Unit Six team was pretty unhappy with the way Obama tried to spike the football and claim credit for it.* Not only did they feel like their own security was violated, they didn't appreciate the way the White House/media reports portrayed them. Owen wanted to set the record straight, and while the prose was occasionally a little lacking, I think he achieved his aim.

* Owen pretty strongly implies that he voted for Obama.

Posted by Evan @ 09/04/12 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

29 August 2012

Ted Cruz interview by Greta Van Susteren

Posted by Evan @ 08/29/12 06:08 AM | Comments (0)

28 August 2012

Video of Ted Cruz's RNC convention speech

Here's the video of Ted Cruz's speech to the Republican convention:

Posted by Evan @ 08/28/12 10:25 PM | Comments (1)

Ted Cruz speech at RNC tonight at 8:30

Ted Cruz speaks tonight to the RNC convention around 8:30pm in Texas. Apparently tedcruz.org is scheduled to have a livestream.

Posted by Evan @ 08/28/12 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

25 August 2012

Sound familiar?

From Marco Rubio's An American Son:

[Charlie Crist] sent a mail piece titled "The Real Rubio" to Republican voters across the state. The front of the piece had an image of what appeared to be militant student protesters, along with a picture of Che Guevara over my left shoulder. On the back, it identified several bills that would have given children of undocumented immigrants in state tuition rates and health insurance.

It didn't work in 2010 in Florida. It didn't work in 2012 in Texas.

Posted by Evan @ 08/25/12 07:09 PM | Comments (0)

06 August 2012

How much is Dewhurst willing to spend?

As soon as the runoff election results came in, people started speculating about 2014. Today, Paul Burka pronounced Dewhurst's political ambitions dead.

That seems to me to rest on one thing, which Burka didn't mention: how much money is Dewhurst willing to spend?

Robert Garrett mentioned something a few days ago that seems very relevant:

Asked what his net contribution of personal funds to the effort was, after some repayments last fall, Dewhurst replied, "A little less than 20 [million dollars], unfortunately."

Under the "millionaires amendment" to the 2002 McCain-Feingold law overhauling federal campaign-finance rules, he now will be able to recoup only $250,000 of that from others.

Why is that so relevant? Sometime in spring 2011 I went back and looked at campaign finance reports from Dewhurst's previous campaigns. In his close campaigns, he had loaned himself up to about $20 million. That seemed to be the psychological barrier. But if I correctly understood some opaque campaign finance reports, he then used lobbyists/megadonors to pay himself most of that back, so that he really was never out much money.

So if Dewhurst can't get back any of the $20 million that he spent on his Senate campaign (now we know why he was more interested at the end of the campaign in raising money rather than winning because the money he raised before election night could be paid back to himself), it is quite possible that he has reached a certain psychological barrier.

Dewhurst obviously has lots of money. But perhaps it isn't 100% clear that he is going to spend so lavishly in a future race.

Posted by Evan @ 08/06/12 08:54 PM | Comments (0)

01 August 2012

Ted Cruz victory speech

Watch Ted Cruz's victory speech:

Posted by Evan @ 08/01/12 11:59 PM | Comments (0)

29 July 2012

"I don't run negative ads" claims David Dewhurst

A few days ago, David Dewhurst made a shocking claim to an Abilene TV station:

"I don't run negative ads."

When you run as many millions in negative ads as he has, you lose credibility.

Posted by Evan @ 07/29/12 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

28 July 2012

Kids for Cash scandal, Ted Cruz & David Dewhurst's Cash for Kids attacks

Since David Dewhurst refuses to defend his moderate record, he has been forced to sink to increasingly false and desperate personal attacks. With the Cash for Kids attack ads, David Dewhurst has achieved a noteworthy low.

Ted Cruz's work in the case would have helped the victims get more money.

Posted by Evan @ 07/28/12 06:33 PM | Comments (0)

David Dewhurst's dirty tricks: fake Sarah Palin endorsement call

UPDATE: I can only confirm one report of the call. A woman came to a tea party booth at an East Texas event and reported how angry she was to get a Palin impersonator robocall endorsing Dewhurst from a voice claiming to be "Sarah." As far as I can tell, this was the source of the various rumors as I haven't been able to track down other first-hand reports.

============

Now that Dewhurst is losing headed into the runoff election day, they are apparently trying a new dirty trick: a call from a Palin impersonator claiming that "Sarah" has endorsed David Dewhurst. On the contrary, Palin has wholeheartedly endorsed Ted Cruz.

When audio is available, it will be posted.

Related: Kids for Cash scandal

Posted by Evan @ 07/28/12 01:07 PM | Comments (1)

27 July 2012

Sarah Palin: David Dewhurst's attacks are disgusting

Aman Batheja writes up Governor Sarah Palin's visit to the Woodlands:

�You know who gave me these boots?� she asked sweetly. �Your governor.�

The crowd cheered. Then Gov Palin delivered the punch line.

�At least in that one case he made a good decision,� she said.

Palin was also quite solicitous about how much she likes Texas.

I thought her best line of the night was "David Dewhurst's attacks are disgusting."

Palin has a unique credibility that specifically allows her to innoculate someone she endorses from attacks. Dewhurst is not going to win this race.

Posted by Evan @ 07/27/12 10:16 PM | Comments (0)

26 July 2012

Dewhurst donor

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Posted by Evan @ 07/26/12 09:37 PM | Comments (0)

David Dewhurst's Record

At last Monday's debate, David Dewhurst said he still runs Falcon Seaboard on a daily basis.

Posted by Evan @ 07/26/12 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

This was a post

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Posted by Evan @ 07/26/12 07:47 AM | Comments (0)

25 July 2012

Dewhurst supported Obama's Trojan Horse "stimulus" tax hike

When Barack Obama passed his $831 billion "stimulus" bill, he included lots of tricks that were designed to trap state governments into increasing spending and taxes. One of the biggest Obama stimulus tricks was giving away money for unemployment insurance, but with major strings attached. Obama's stimulus bill forced state governments to agree to raise taxes in order to receive federal money.

Check out what Governor Rick Perry said about Obama's back-door big government ruse:

I did reject $555 million in federal stimulus dollars that would have mandated the state of Texas to pay costlier benefits and put higher taxes on Texas employers indefinitely. Even if we had accepted these stimulus funds, Texas would have still seen higher unemployment taxes, bond financing and federal borrowing to keep benefits from the UI Trust Fund flowing.

David Dewhurst has been calling himself a fighter during this campaign. So you'd expect that he fought tooth and nail against Obama's attempt to force Texas to raise taxes, right?

WRONG. Under David Dewhurst's leadership, the Texas Senate passed Obama's back-door tax hike.* While Texas liberals applauded, Dewhurst said nothing. As Lieutenant Governor, he could have stopped the bill in a million ways through procedural trickery. Dewhurst did nothing.

But maybe it wasn't that big of a deal? Wrong. Obama's hidden tax increase is a big job killer.

Last week, Nina Easton reported in Fortune magazine about how the provision is killing jobs (hat tip to Push Junction for the link). The piece is called The silent job killer: Our unemployment system

Between 2008 and 2011, $174 billion in unemployment taxes was collected while $450 billion was paid out in benefits, a gap of $276 billion. 34 states blew through their unemployment insurance trust funds and borrowed from Washington -- and 22 of those still owe the feds a total of more than $30 billion, according to the Tax Foundation. The foundation's study concluded that some states will not fully repay those loans for years.

The new costs of hiring [from Obama's unemployment insurance "stimulus"] come just as the National Federation of Independent Business has published a gloomy survey of small companies showing negative job creation and pessimism about the future. "There was no good news in the June survey" released last week, the trade association said. "NFIB members didn't add a lot of jobs and don't plan to in the coming months."

Read the full Easton piece to get a full sense of just how bad taking the unemployment money would have been for Texas. Here's a snippet:

While South Carolina businesses with no past unemployment claims will see a tax reduction, businesses with a history of layoffs -- about a third of them in this state, where unemployment is still over 9% -- face job-crippling increases ranging from 100% to 600%.

Cyclical jobs like manufacturing would have faced huge tax increases for hiring more workers. That was kosher to Dewhurst. Fortunately Governor Perry rejected the Dewhurst Senate's attempt to kill Texas jobs!

Why did Dewhurst fail to do anything to stop Obama's job-killing tax hikes? On May 12, 2010 David Dewhurst sat down for an interview with the Texas Tribune, and he told us why: he supported them!

Transcript:

David Dewhurst: I can make an argument [for or against].
Evan Smith: But you support the governor's decision in the end to not take the money?
David Dewhurst: I probably would have taken the money.

Dewhurst goes on to say that it was a "very, very close" decision, even though he would have taken the money.

David Dewhurst had his chance to stand up to all of Obama's hidden taxes and fight for Texas. Instead Dewhurst joined with moderate Republicans like Kevin Eltife and Bob Deuell to pass a bill that would have raised taxes and killed jobs.

How can Dewhurst ask us to trust him to fight Obama and ObamaCare when Dewhurst supported Obama's job-killing tax hikes?

* With Dewhurst's tacit support, moderate Republicans Kevin Eltife and Bob Deuell led the charge to approve Obama's tax hike.

24 July 2012

Twitter "I voted" mentions as a measure of enthusiasm

Jim Barksdale is quoted as saying:

If we have data, let�s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine

Previously I've looked at clearly imperfect but interesting proxies for measuring grassroots support and enthusiasm in the Republican runoff.

I counted Twitter for mentions of having voted for either "Dewhurst" (anywhere in tweet) or "Ted Cruz" or "tedcruz."

Today, between 12:01am and 8pm during Tuesday early voting, the results were:

Voted for David Dewhurst: 4
Voted for Ted Cruz: 159

Yesterday in the morning I also counted (between 7am and 1pm on Monday morning) and the count was:
Dewhurst: 3
Cruz: 42

Most interestingly, there were more people who said they voted against Dewhurst without ever mentioning Cruz (7) than actual people mentioning they'd voted for Dewhurst (4). That would support the notion that Dewhurst's attacks are driving up Dewhurst's negatives more than they are convincing people not to vote for Dewhurst.

A note on methodology: searching for Dewhurst should pick up all his support, while if a tweet mentioned only "Cruz," it wouldn't have been counted. As such, if anything my count undercounted Cruz.

Dewhurst's business partner

Temporary layaway to the paid archive.

Posted by Evan @ 07/24/12 03:49 PM | Comments (3)

22 July 2012

As I noted on Twitter, it is a strange dynamic for the folks in the Texas legislature: as it continues to look increasingly probable that David Dewhurst will lose the Republican runoff, every legislator has more of an incentive to promote Dewhurst's senate bid because he is more likely to return as Lt Guv.

We have particularly seen this in the last few weeks, as Republican legislators got much more vocal for Dewhurst when they realized Dewhurst was likely to be back for the next session.

Strange incentives, indeed.

Posted by Evan @ 07/22/12 11:04 PM | Comments (0)

21 July 2012

Perry to fundraise for Dewhurst on election eve

Governor Perry is headlining a Dallas fundraiser for David Dewhurst on election eve.

Think about that: rather than try to take his last possible chance to motivate or persuade voters, Dewhurst is going to spend the last night of the election raising money.

Dewhurst cares more about getting his money back ( he has loaned his campaign between 10-20 million) than he does about winning. That is astounding.

Even more importantly Dewhurst is signaling that he doesn't expect to win the primary. If he thought he was going to win, then there would be plenty of time later to get paid back. However, once he has lost the runoff, it becomes much more difficult to convince donors to give.to his federal campaign (which has 5k caps anyway combining the primary and runoff)

Posted by Evan @ 07/21/12 08:00 PM | Comments (0)

20 July 2012

What endorsement will Dewhurst unveil at Monday's debate?

Thursday morning when the King St Patriots debate was announced, I tweeted that Dewhurst's poll numbers must be deteriorating rapidly for Dewhurst to all of a sudden stop dodging debates. Today a poll of DFW came out that had Cruz winning by 10. Most interesting was the data point that 16% of folks who voted for Dewhurst in May were switching to Cruz. What percent was switching from Cruz to Dewhurst? 0%. That's right: ZERO percent.

But after playing hide-the-candidate for so long, my guess is that the Dewhurst campaign is also planning on unveiling an endorsement.

KBH seems like the logical endorsement for Dewhurat to unveil. and like Leppert I have long assumed that she
is likely to eventually endorse Dewhurst. There's certainly some reasons she might not endorse. I am skeptical she would help much even in DFW even if she does endorse.

There are other potential big-name endorsers but this late in the game an endorser needs to elicit a strong emotional reaction to change attitudes.

The only real name Dewhurst could unveil that might move the dial is probably W

(Apologies for typos and terseness as I am typing from my phone)

Update 7/23 1:30pm: If I had to guess, I'd guess Dewhurst releases Dan Patrick endorsement tonight, with KBH second likely.

RELATED: David Dewhurst's record

Posted by Evan @ 07/20/12 10:42 PM | Comments (0)

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