While I’m anxiously awaiting the day my state sends to Washington a senator I can be proud of * (well, as proud as one can be a of senator), one of our current emissaries to the federal capital simply can’t stop making an ass of himself. What part of founding a group called “No Labels” tells you that Joe Scarborough is interested in wearing your party label? Honestly, you can’t even call the guy a RINO. And what part of the fact that Scarborough makes his living attacking Sarahpalin on MSNBC tells you that this would be anything more than Charlie Crist redux? The only worse candidate would be if Cornyn asked Arlen Specter to retire to Florida and run for senate.
On the presumption that Cornyn will get Morning Joe to run, I’d like to apologize to the voters of Florida. I voted for Cornyn in 2008, because he seemed inoffensive. But this is now the second time he has interjected himself into your state’s politics. First, he got Charlie Crist to run, but you guys had the good sense to elect Marco Rubio instead. So thanks, Florida, for bailing out my senator’s idiocy once. I’m sorry that you may have to do it twice.
* As though I weren’t already torn enough regarding whom to support in that race, Cruz or Williams, an alumnus of our alma mater, Dallas mayor Tom Leppert, has also jumped into the race and is pitching himself as being pretty conservative. It’s like everybody got together and decided that I, personally, was the target demographic.
I sat down the other day and added up the total cost (in time and money) of my education. Had I apprenticed myself to a plumber straight out of high school, I would be immeasurably better off financially; I’d be a skilled worker with an opportunity to start my own business, and I could go as far as my skill and ambition would take me. Perhaps I’d be less interesting, but probably not. Do you know how many worthwhile hobbies one can have with an extra decade of financial stability and not taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans?
The future of higher education simply must be different than what it is now. Currently, it’s an inefficient system to transfer money from the young and poor to the old and financially stable. Couple it with the Social Security and Medicare taxes I’m paying on my income right now (egad), and it is simply jawdropping to think about the portion of my life taken from me to support old people who have already had the opportunity to provide for their own well-being. The well-to-do elderly get my money while I have to delay trivial matters like home ownership and children. What a system!
Bring on the education reform, send the overpaid geezer professors into retirement, and give America’s youth their lives back rather than forcing them into education until they’re 30 and loan repayment (if they’re lucky) until they’re 40. A society doesn’t become great or maintain greatness by destroying the productive years of its citizens’ lives.
If you’re like me, you read the phrase “cultural leaders” and think of people like P. Diddy, Martha Stewart, and the costume designers for Mad Men. Ya know, the people who lead the culture.
Instead, the “cultural leaders” in the story are: “Nancy Bless, executive director of Texas Folklife, a statewide nonprofit organization that promotes traditional culture,” “Amy M. Barbee , executive director of the Texas Cultural Trust, which promotes the importance of the arts,” and “Tere O’Connor of the Heritage Society of Austin.”
Ah yes, “culture” doesn’t refer to our actual culture. It refers to select elements of the culture of yore that some quirky people believe are worth preserving. You see, our actual culture – the books we read, the music we listen to, the way we dress, the tools we use – doesn’t need government’s help in preserving it, and it doesn’t need “leaders” in the people-with-titles sense of the word. We’re a free people who do what we want, and as such our culture is organic, ever-changing, and self-sustaining. It doesn’t take a government handout to support modern cloth production the way it takes a government handout to support some woman in a period costume who handweaves cloth from hand-picked cotton so she can tell school children about it.
So let me suggest a rephrasing. The people in this story aren’t actually “cultural leaders,” and calling them such gives them too much credibility. “Oh no!” says a reader, “Gov. Perry’s budget eliminates our culture!” Instead, let’s use the more accurate phrasing: ”people with jobs that revolve around their unusual tastes.” I think that gets across the point that, in essence, government support for these groups is taking from the many to indulge the odd preferences of a few. Though now that I put it that, I can see why they prefer “cultural leaders.”
According to his arrest affidavit, Gutierrez said he believed a large tunnel system lay under Gillis Park near Oltorf Street and that people were being held there against their will. He admitted he started the fire at the Green Muse Cafe because he wanted to inform the public of the tunnel and “what was really going on here,” the document said.
He started nine fires over two months, causing $187,000 in damages.
And since I’m on the topic of delusional things in Austin, I’ll link to this op-ed from today’s paper. Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.
Texas appears to be moving toward making teenage sexting not a felony. The attorney general says he’s not aware of any teenagers being prosecuted for kiddy porn under existing law, which is a good thing, but we shouldn’t leave bad laws laying around waiting for some jackass prosecutor to try to be the first to use.
Still, I can’t help but feel that the laudable current effort is still several years behind the mores of our times:
[State Senator Kirk ] Watson and [Attorney General Greg] Abbott said the new provision covering parents is designed to allow parents to be involved in court-ordered programs about the dangers of sexting. Abbott said he suspects that most of the teenagers who are sending sexually explicit images “don’t understand the consequences of what they’re doing.”
By sending explicit photos of themselves, he said, “they are exposing themselves around the world.”
The thought that would make Watson’s and Abbot’s skin crawl is this: the teenagers are perfectly aware of the consquences of what they are doing. We’re not dealing with illiterate babes in the woods being exploited here, we’re dealing with tech savvy kids loaded with hormones who are exchanging pictures with people exactly like themselves. I doubt there’s one out of twenty sexters who would be surprised to learn that their pictures could get beyond the original audience. As I’ve long said,* there’s a changing culture regarding nude and explicit pictures. In 20 years, I suspect these sexting teenagers will look back not with horror, like today’s serious adults expect, but with bemusement.
*That post is from 2007, but the bitter counterfactual it references looms much larger today. Then it only dealt with a senate seat. Now we can look back and think that if only Seven of Nine had fewer hangups about having sex with complete strangers back in the 90s, we’d have a different president today. It’s like I lost out twice.
Dear God, this is the most embarrassing moment in Texas history. If we were Japanese, we’d all kill ourselves now, but frankly it’s too cold for that sort of nonsense.
It’s so cold that we’re having rolling blackouts. To be truthful, I don’t understand the causation. Seems to me that this state uses much more electricity in the summer than any amount of cold could cause us to use.
It’s irrelevant to your humble correspondent, however, so I will inquire no farther. You see, I am a government employee who works in the vacinity of many other government employees, and the people making the decision about who loses power either are or are paid by government employees. I’ve just gotten an email stating that, miracle of miracles, our small area of town is not subject to the blackouts. Thank heavens – I need a hot cup of coffee so I can talk with my coworkers about how cold the plebs must be out there without power.
No sooner has the soon-to-be-unlamented Kay Bailey Hutchinson announced that her middling senate career will be coming to its natural, shrug-inducing end, than not one but two conservative stars have declared that they want the spot.
Ted Cruz is a Reaganite and a top flight lawyer who assertively used his position as Texas’s Solicitor General to advance the cause of constitutional government through the courts. His win in Medellin was a major victory for federalism, and he was the leader in getting 31 states to sign on as amicus for the plaintiff in Heller, the landmark Second Amendment case. And, as mentioned here, his wife went to the same college we did.
Michael Williams has been a major voice for Tea Party conservatism in Texas, and has used his twelve years on the Railroad Commission (which regulates Texas’s oil & gas industry) to make serious pro-growth changes in the Texas energy industry. The Commission’s decision several years ago to allow and encourage hydraulic fracture drilling opened up America’s largest natural gas field. He would bring real energy expertise to the senate, which is mostly composed of ignorant boobs (read: lawyers). Just as importantly, he would bring diversity to the senate, which has not had a bow-tie wearer since Paul Simon left in 1996.
Sadly, at most one of these men will be our next senator. Personally, I’d like it if John Cornyn also retired so that both Cruz and Williams could serve. While Cornyn’s votes are generally unobjectionable, conservatives will best remember him as the man who headed the Republican Senate Campaign Committee during the cycle when it endorsed two party-jumping liberals (Arlen Specter and Charlie Crist). If he stays true to form, Cornyn will throw his support behind Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst, who strikes me as one of only two men in America sad to see Charlie Crist lose last year.
Yesterday our governor and lieutenant governor were sworn in for their new terms in office. Today, we start with the sober business of balancing the state’s budget.
The legislature’s going to have $72 billion to spend for the next two years; if current levels of services were maintained, it would require $99 billion. If current levels of spending were maintained, without accounting for population growth or inflation, it would require $87 billion. Plainly, either taxes have to go up, or spending has to come down. And merely reducing the rate of spending growth and shuffling around money through accounting tricks will not get it done. This is going to require real tax hikes, or real spending cuts. The Republicans in office were elected on a pledge of not raising taxes, so these cuts are going to be very real.
The Texas budget is going to be important for conservatives nationally. This state is very much the standard-bearer for the national Republican party, and for conservative Republicans in particular. We’ve got more than a 2/3 Republican majority in the state House, and almost as big of a majority in the Senate. We’ve got a Republican elected to every statewide office. Our governor has been a prominent national booster of the Tea Party, and our lieutenant governor is enough of a political chameleon that he’s currently going along with Tea Party sentiment. Most importantly, we’ve got an electorate that believes this state should be setting an example for other states, and for the federal government as well. For now, at least, Texans seem to be in a mood to see these budget cuts through, even if it hurts.
In short, if the conservative approach of balancing budgets through cutting spending without raising taxes can work anywhere, it has to work here, and it has to work now. I’ll be posting updates as the process develops. I’ve got faith that Gov. Goodhair will stick to his pledge, but it’s not obvious what the end result will look like.
Yes, that’s an actual state holiday here in Texas. I’m at work, even though I don’t have to be, on the principle of the matter. And I wore a blue shirt to honor all my Confederate heroes.
How fast does the wind blow in Texas? I dunno, but the weather man just advised that, because it will be windy today, people should keep both hands on the steering wheel during the morning commute.
. . . or Rick Perry is full of crap. Or both, but can this possibly be true?
I can’t find any “fact check” sites looking at this, but the claim that 80% of all private sector jobs created in the US over the last five years were created in Texas genuinely buggers belief.
Bear in mind, I’m not questioning the awesomeness of Texas – which is epic. Rather, I just can’t believe that the rest of the country sucks that much. The other 49 states can barely manage to create 1 job for every 4 created in Texas?
I once talked to an elected judge here in Texas about voter ignorance. And if you want to find real voter ignorance, look at judicial elections in Texas. One of my favorite poll results of all time comes from an exit poll conducted in Lubbock in 1976. 66% of respondents favored Texas’s system of partisan judicial elections, but 86% could not name a single judicial candidate.
Anyhow, back to the judge I was talking to. In looking at other judicial races, he would attribute victories and losses to silly things, like the name of the candidate (”Cambell sounds like the soup, and people like to vote for food names”), scurrilous and unbelievable rumors that had circulated during the campaign, or supposed vote buying or other sorts of fraud. But as to his personal election, he seemed to sincerely believe that the voters had rewarded his years of public service.
I’m with Somin on the virtues of rational ignorance, and having seen the inside of the Texas judiciary, I’m still a big fan of partisan judicial elections. At the end of the day, I believe that Churchill had it right, and that democracy remains the worst form of government except for all the others.
Passing through San Saba, Texas (aka “The Pecan Capital of the World”), home of 2,637 people in the middle of the Texas wilderness, and there’s a local coffee shop that offers free wifi and a decent cup of joe. It’s across the street from the town’s feed store, which has seen a steady stream of ranchers filling up their trucks since I’ve been here.
So the Governor of Arizona may have exaggerated stories of drug violence in her state. Because the entire nation now believes that Arizona’s business is our business, this is the subject of a Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post. Being the ass he is, Milbank can’t resist this bit of facetiousness:
Ay, caramba! Those dark-skinned foreigners are now severing the heads of fair-haired Americans? Maybe they’re also scalping them or shrinking them or putting them on a spike.
There was, of course, nothing about hair or skin color in what the governor said.* If Milbank would get out of his Beltway bubble, where most “Mexicans” are in fact Guatamalans or Salvadorans with very dark skin, he’d know what those of us in the southwest know, which is that a very large number of Mexicans are not dark-skinned at all. A couple of hours watching Telemundo would leave you to believe that Mexicans are as white as the king of Spain. Certainly there are tons of Mexicans here in Austin who, at the end of a Texas summer, are whiter than me.
Mexico is a racially diverse country, ranging from tall and pale people of pure Spanish decent to short, dark people of unbroken Mayan lineage. Arizona and Texas border the northern, whiterregions of Mexico – except for their, um, different driving style, it is difficult to tell these people from native Texans. In large part, because there’s very little difference. Those of us who have daily interaction with actual Mexicans fully understand this, and don’t stereotypically think of them as “dark-skinned.”
That’s just the editorial overlay of a jackass east coaster who thinks so poorly of his countrymen that he believes opposition to illegal immigration simply must come from a bunch of racist bumpkins. Few things so greatly display one’s ignorance as to incorrectly presume the ignorance of others.
*Indeed, she claimed that bodies were being found without heads, so we would have no clue what color hair they had. But a good journalist should never let details get in the way of a race mongering cheap shot.
