Rick Perry vs World

26 July 2012

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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)