Around here, the talk is about Jerry Jones changing Cowboys’ coaches again and the Rangers blowing millions to upgrade the 2022 team. Once in a while, people do talk about the elections and Governor Abbott got more good news today. This is from The UT-Tyler poll and The Dallas Morning News:
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is running 11 percentage points ahead of Democrat Beto O’Rourke in this year’s race for Texas governor, according to a Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday.
Buoyed by 2-to-1 support among whites and a growing number of voters who identify as Republican, Abbott leads O’Rourke in a hypothetical matchup, 47%-36%. He even holds a narrow lead over O’Rourke among Hispanics, 40%-39%.
The poll also said that the “generic ballot” for Congress favors the GOP 54%-44% and poor President Biden is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Texans.
Maybe we understand now why President Biden won’t be campaigning for a lot of Democrats down here. Beto already said no to having Mr. Biden helping him.
Let me add a couple of thoughts.
I’m not surprised that Mr. O’Rourke is off to a slow start. This is 2022 and not 2018. Beto defined himself as a Bernie Sanders liberal in the 2020 primaries and shot himself in the foot with an AR-15.
As for the Governor, he is a competent man but does not have the charismatic qualities of former Governor Perry. He is also under attack from the right for not doing more on the border. Honestly, what else is he supposed to do? The good news for the Governor is that he will survive the primary challenges and start spending all that money painting O’Rourke as a liberal.
So far so good, if you like the Governor as I do. The best part of this poll is how the Governor is tied with Hispanics. I guess that Democrats are finally starting to realize that there is more to being a Hispanic than talking about immigration reform or DACA.
Let me conclude with a crazy thought. I would not be surprised if Mr. O’Rourke pulls out of this race before the primary. He can’t afford a double-digit loss in November and he knows it.
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P.S. You can listen to my show. If you like our posts, please look for ”Donate” on the right column of the blog page.
In a few weeks, President Biden will present a candidate for the Supreme Court. All we know is that it will be a black woman. Yes, on the 59th anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech, we will select a person based on her skin color.
So what does the GOP do?
Some are calling for the GOP to hold up the appointment, or using some Senate rules to keep the nomination from going to a floor debate. Others are calling for a battle over her opinions, legal or otherwise. Others, like Professor Jonathan Turley, are questioning the racial component of the nomination given cases that the Court may be looking at soon:
Biden's controversial use of racial and gender criteria will only grow in the coming months as the Supreme Court considers two new cases involving racial preferences in college admissions. Those cases may now be heard before a Court with one member who was expressly selected initially on the basis of not of a racial preference but a racial exclusionary rule.
What does the GOP do? Confirm the lady and move on. Don't let the Democrats use the nomination to play the race card, and you know that's their plan. What else do they know what to do?
Confirm the lady. She will not change the ideological balance on the court. She will join Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan in writing minority opinions but have no consequence on the major cases, such as abortion or racial preferences in schools.
The GOP should not allow the Biden administration to change the subject. Most Americans are worried about inflation, the fights over mandates and the general economy. Arguing over a woman that will not change the court is not worth it.
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The Biden administration's open border policy is alive and well. The numbers are amazing for people who have followed this over the years. I have never seen anything like this. This is from the New York Post:
Biden breaks records every month, with apprehensions on track to reach a million in his first full year. You can see why they keep coming: The Border Patrol estimates that hundreds of thousands more pass through without interception, while the administration releases most of those it does catch, even quietly resettling migrants all across the country.
The only White House strategy here, in other words, is to try keeping the crisis out of the headlines while sending as few illegal crossers as possible home.
This is obscene and it has nothing to do with immigration reform, DACA or asylum. We have legal ways to come to the U.S. and this is not how you legally cross the border. How do I know? I came to the U.S. with my parents and we had to follow a process. Our family left Cuba and then had to wait, at our expense, in Jamaica as our "papers" were being processed.
The Biden administration has benefited from national media coverage that does not tell Americans what's going on or keeps track of these people as they fly to their destination. Down in South Texas, the Biden administration has not been so lucky, as we see in the growing dissatisfaction with the border crisis.
To make matters worse, these people are coming into the country without vaccine requirements or isolation periods. How many of these people have COVID and have infected others? No one knows.
Will President Biden be impeached over this? I don't know, but his administration is not enforcing the law to the loss of his fellow citizens.
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The Democrats are just getting sillier by the minute. Where are the serious people in the party? I can't see too many of them.
The latest is talking about "threats to democracy" and Miami talk radio. This is from Alex Perez:
The painful reality for the Latinx set is that Hispanics are, as Ruy Teixeira recently wrote, “a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working-class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns.” Which means they have more in common with working-class Americans of all races than they do with Democratic Party elites. Anti-Americanism, violent riots, and pathological obsessions with racial and gender categorization cut no ice with them.
Well written, Alex.
The left is attacking Miami talk radio for having strong opinions against the leftist rhetoric. This is true and anyone who grew up in a Cuban home, as I did, knows that our parents' generation hated communism and told us how rotten it was every time we got together for dinner. They lived it. They remember how socialism destroyed their island and its way of life. They lived through the rewriting of history in government schools.
Miami talk radio is not a threat to democracy even if the screaming and intensity can burn your car speaker. Miami talk radio is pro-democracy because everyone from the grandparents still around to the younger generation who have never visited Cuba, knows how the left will eventually destroy dissent by calling every form of it a “threat to democracy.”
They call him Representative Cuellar in South Texas and a Democrat on the border who makes a lot of sense. He speaks his mind and has been critical of the Biden approach, i.e. open border. Nevertheless, he may be in trouble in a year that Democrats already have a lot of problems. This is from The Texas Tribune:
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar may be the most powerful Texas Democrat whom most Texans have never heard of. But with early voting to begin in a matter of weeks, he is in a world of political trouble.
On Wednesday, the FBI raided the nine-term congressman’s home in Laredo. For now, government officials are keeping a tight lid on what spurred their actions. But it could not come at a worse time for Cuellar, who is in the fight of his political life ahead of the Democratic primary on March 1.
We will wait for the FBI to finish whatever they’ve started. In the meantime, the politics of the district may be in play.
In 2020, Mr. Cuellar won easily with 58% of the vote. He will be running for reelection in a slightly different district with a partisan + 7 Democrat edge. He won by almost 20 in 2020 but will have to fight a bit harder in 2022 because of redistricting.
The FBI story won’t help Mr. Cuellar especially if something embarrassing comes out. According to news reports, this is a federal investigation about Azerbaijan and a group of U.S. businessmen who have ties to that country. In the meantime, this is bad news for the Democrats because they thought that this was a safe seat that could handle the expected red wave.
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Our insane world has hit woke bottom. This is from Fox News:
Penn swimmer Lia Thomas came away with wins in the 100 meter and 200-meter freestyle races against Harvard on Saturday.
The victories came days after the NCAA updated its policy for transgender participation and how it will be determined on a sport-by-sport basis.
What did Thomas do? He, and he is a he, shattered women's records. Who knows what women were denied scholarships because of this?
The answer is for men to compete with men and women with women. It's not discrimination. It's common sense.
Let's give a cheer for Texas for understanding that biology makes boys and girls different. A few months ago, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 25:
Texas’ transgender student athletes will be restricted from playing on K-12 school sports teams that align with their gender identity under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday.
House Bill 25, authored by state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, will require student athletes who compete in interscholastic competition to play on sports teams that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate at or near their time of birth. It is set to go into effect Jan. 18.
The legislation goes further than current rules from the University Interscholastic League, which governs school sports in Texas. Under current UIL rules, a student’s gender is determined by their birth certificate. But UIL also accepts legally modified birth certificates in which someone may have had their sex changed to align with their gender identity.
The Texas approach makes sense. The NCAA is woke and weak. The NCAA refuses to go the distance and make a statement to protect young women. Again, this is not about discrimination. It's about common sense -- something lacking on the woke side of the world.
We are not talking about T-ball. This is competitive sports where size and speed matter. As the uncle of five nieces who participated in high school sports, I think that everyone at the NCAA leadership should resign.
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This week, the US Supreme Court spoke again about the Texas abortion law. This is Shannon Bream:
The Supreme Court rejected a request to remand Texas’ six-week abortion law back a federal district court Thursday, marking another setback for advocates who have been fighting to strike down the controversial measure.
Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer dissented from the decision, which returns the issue to a state court for additional procedural determinations.
As I see it, six of the nine Justices are saying that what happens in Texas stays in Texas. In other words, the voters elected the legislature, they passed the “heartbeat law’, the Governor signed it, and it’s up to the citizens of Texas to do something about it.
The pro-abortion forces are going crazy with the idea that the people of Texas should decide. Some claim that the Justices have once again betrayed the people. No one is betrayed but a few babies will live.
What message are the Justices sending? Let’s remember that the Mississippi opinion has not been published. We should get that one in June.
It is true that the Supreme Court has not ruled on the constitutionality of the Texas law. My guess is that they will answer that question in a few months when they write an opinion saying that states can regulate abortion.
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Did you miss President Biden's press conference? Well, it was too early (3 p.m. Texas), too long and frankly a lot of topics overlooked. And, last but not least, we saw President Biden trying to sell us something that no one wants to buy.
There were many reactions in the media to the press conference. This was my favorite from Phillip Wegmann:
President Biden, frustrated but defiant in the face of layered domestic and international crises, held forth for nearly two hours Wednesday in just his second solo press conference at the White House, breaking historic records while blaming Republicans and defending the results of his first 12 months in the Oval Office.
There was bravado. Biden insisted his accomplishments were “bigger than any president has ever gotten in the first year.” Unabashed audacity too: “I make no apologies for what I did,” he said about how the war in Afghanistan was ended. And, at times, confusion: One minute, he rejected the suggestion that he needed to be “more realistic” about passing his legislative agenda; the next, he conceded his Build Back Better spending plan would likely need to be broken into “big chunks.”
At times, it seemed like the president was shooting from the hip on a range of issues, calling into question the legitimacy of the 2022 midterms 10 months prior to the election and seemingly offering tacit approval of a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by Russia. It was the kind of unfiltered free-for-all that the press corps craves and the kind of stuff they hadn’t gotten since the previous president (reluctantly) left office.
Yes, Mr. Wegmann. He did seem like he was shooting from the hip and jumping around a lot. I thought that the remarks about Ukraine were amazingly stupid. The talk about "voting rights" silly because he knew two weeks ago that it was not going to pass. After all, smart executives regroup and try a different path. They don't stick to the failed approach and then call you a pal of Jefferson Davis.
There were two more problems with this press conference.
First, no one watches television at 3 p.m. in Texas. Furthermore, the people interested in politics at that time are listening to conservative talk radio. Why at that time? It's obvious to the naked eye that the Biden team does want him in front of many people.
Second, why didn't the press ask questions about city violence, the border, unvaccinated people crossing the border, etc.
What happens now? He will not go up in the polls. Mission unaccomplished if the idea of this press conference was to turn things around.
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