PN-G bamatex

[Hidden Content]   All that "reset" crap Obama and Clinton peddled in 2009? Yeah, apparently that includes a second cold war.

      Both of you, tone down the personal insults.

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If Obama chooses to make frequent use of his veto power, he'll be vetoing his way into the history books as one of the least effective presidents of modern times. Effective presidents recognize changes in the political scene and make the necessary adjustments to carry out the nation's business. Obama has no record of doing so, no ability to do so and no intention of doing so.   Case in point: the ultimatum Obama issued today. Instead of doing what a politically savvy Bill Clinton did or what an unlucky George W. Bush tried and failed to do by presenting an approachable, workable front and offering a Congress held by the opposing party an opportunity to work together, he told a lame duck Congress that it has six weeks to get immigration reform done, or suffer the consequences of having it done for them through a series of likely illegal executive orders.   Of course, Obama knows immigration reform won't get done in that time span. And he has every intention of living up to his promise. At the end of this year, when the dust is settled and Harry Reid has successfully stifled any actual attempt to get something done in Congress while erroneously blaming Republicans, Obama will live up to his promise. He'll probably issue all those executive orders, which will be successfully challenged by Republicans and struck down in the courts.   And that will set up the narrative to galvanize the Hispanic vote in 2016. "The Republicans don't want your friends and families to have citizenship."   Why is Obama doing this? Because he's not a leader, a good president or even really a skilled politician. It's because Barack Obama is and always has been a PR expert. He doesn't run for office to get anything done, he runs for it for the sake of winning it and holding the power. When it comes right down to it, he'll do whatever it takes to hold onto power. It's the classic Chicago mafia way, and in this case, that means setting things up to establish and support a propagandist narrative rather than to actually get something positive done.   If the Republicans are smart, they'll read the play and have a response ready. When they start challenging those executive orders in the courts, they need to simultaneously have a bill in drafting in Congress to get major immigration reform done. They need to pass that bill, they need to send it to Obama and they need to force his hand. Either he signs it, and the Republicans get a lot of what they want, or he vetoes it, in which case the Republicans have something to contradict the narrative that the Democrats are gung-ho on getting it done and the Republicans are the ones standing in the way. Either way, it's a win-win. They then need to complement this strategy by either nominating Marco Rubio for president in 2016 or having Susana Martinez on the ballot as the VP candidate.

  That's just fine. Greg Abbot won Jefferson County tonight. Let the Democrats vote straight ticket.

By the end of tonight, the Republican party will hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate. If Mary Landrieu falls in the Louisiana runoff as I expect she will, that majority will increase to 54 seats. That's a ten seat swing, and two more seats than even the most favorable polls gave the Republicans in this mid-term election.   On the state level, I couldn't be happier to see the twenty point clobbering that Greg Abbott gave Wendy Davis, and I hope that sends a clear signal to all of the rich Democrat PACs from other parts of the country that have been pouring money into our state.   It was a really good night.

  [Hidden Content]   Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

LSU is, hands down, the most talented two-loss team in the country.   A buddy of mine kept saying there was no way they'd crack the top 20 after beating Ole Miss, and I told him #17 over and over again. Should have made a bet on it.

Dude, if you're wrapped up in college football enough that you're keeping track of every little incident where a fan of your team's rival does something wrong, and you're ready to pull that list out any time a fan of said rival makes a comment about a general perception that has nothing to do with you or your team, you might need to lay off the football and reassess your priorities for a little while.

  I didn't mock them. I just stated a perception of LSU fans shared by many fans in the SEC, including those in your own fanbase. After all, it was an Auburn fan who coined the term, "corndog."   That's not exactly running around with a rap sheet for individual members of a fanbase like you are.

  A long list that only indicates crazy people will do crazy things. That's life. I could probably spend ten minutes using Google to find stupid things done by Auburn fans, but I'm not going to. Why? Because I'm not going to let a rivalry turn into an obsession.

  This post is funny, too, because it reveals the obvious little-sister complex you must have to keep a record of all of the events you just outlined on your team's rival school.

  It's not uncommon to hear people say that LSU is the Texas Tech of the SEC, and it wouldn't surprise me if there's a similar saying at Big XII schools.

  You know that abrasive, backwards cousin every family has that lives out in the boondocks and is a pain to deal with for the rest of the family at weddings, funerals and Thanksgiving?   That's kind of how LSU is for the rest of the SEC.

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  Any Democrat gubernatorial candidate would have had to tow the party line on the abortion bill, yes. But not every candidate would have had their entire political career explicitly tied to it.   Davis is not politically stupid. If the governorship was really what she wanted, there are other things she could have done to galvanize the Democrat base in Texas without antagonizing the average Texas voter she would need to win over. She wanted attention for no other reason than to have attention, because she knew she wasn't going to win her Senate seat again. The gubernatorial aspirations had to have come after the filibuster - it doesn't make good political sense otherwise - and I suspect they arose for the same reason the filibuster did: attention, plain and simple.   I guarantee you she's angling for something else here. She had to have known the whole time she couldn't have won the governorship. She wants some kind of consolation prize.

  Exactly how smart it was is up for debate.   The polls I saw at that time said that the specific bill Wendy Davis filibustered had a 60% approval rating among Texas voters. Polls I've seen since then say 59% of Texas voters are some form of pro-life.   If Davis's goal in that filibuster was to announce her campaign for governor, she couldn't have picked a worse bill to filibuster. You can't run an effective campaign for governor when your lone claim to fame is a filibuster of a bill 60% of the people in your state agreed with. If she had filibustered a bill on a separate issue where there's less agreement with the Republicans among Texas voters - a bill cutting funding for public education, for instance - she could have caught similar attention at least within the state, and she would have been in a far better position to run her campaign for governor.   If, on the other hand, the goal here isn't the governorship like I suspect, then Davis's ploy worked perfectly. Davis's term in the Senate was due to be up this year. In both of her elections to the Senate prior to this cycle, Davis barely won her district - she won 49.9% of the vote during a race in which there were three candidates running in her district in 2008, and she won just 51.1% of the vote in 2012. By virtue of her drawing the dreaded two-year Texas Senate term out of a hat, she would have been up for reelection to the Senate this year.   Any political strategist worth his salt knows that mid-term election cycles, which happen to coincide with gubernatorial election cycles in the State of Texas, are typically bad years for Democrats. The core Democrat constituencies don't turn out to vote in the same numbers for mid-terms like they do presidential elections. Davis, having barely won her district in presidential election years with record high turnout for the Democrat voting base, had to have known that it wasn't in the cards for her to win her Senate seat again this year. I think she decided to go out with a bang, and that was the impetus behind her infamous filibuster over the abortion bill. I think that filibuster caught her more attention than she expected, and she saw an opportunity to win the Democrat nomination for Texas Governor, which would allow her to go out with an even bigger bang than she had previously expected (she knows, and has known the entire race, that she doesn't have a shot of winning without a serious mistake from Abbott, which he has yet to give her). I think the endgame for Davis has never been the governorship, I think it's a pricey book deal and a possible federal appointment. And right now, she's on track to get exactly that.

Regardless of the underlying impetus, this, in conjunction with A&M's poor season and last week's loss in particular, will do a lot for recruiting at Texas.

Perhaps it's because I now spend nine months a year outside of Texas, but I have yet to see Abbott's campaign do anything that approaches the mudslinging Davis's campaign has engaged in. Maybe some PACs have, but keep in mind that everything I've listed here came directly from Davis's campaign, not from an associated PAC.

[Hidden Content]   Forgive the use of an overtly partisan source for this information. I think it's perfectly acceptable given that the tweets and quotes cited in the article come directly from Wendy Davis's campaign, itself.   This is getting very old very quickly. I'll give Davis credit for sticking to the facts in the debates, even though it was obvious Abbott didn't care much about the debates because of their relative insignificance in the greater scope of an election he's been winning by double digits the entire time it's been underway. But all these attacks regarding Abbott's paraplegia, and now an accusation that he may oppose interracial marriage when he's married to an Hispanic?   Like I said earlier, there are very few cases where I enjoy watching a Democrat lose more than I enjoy watching a Republican win. This is one of those cases. This woman needs to be booted out of Texas politics.

  Don't try. Just don't try. Any other liberal poster on this site will have a real discussion, but with her, it's just not worth it.

  Don't speak too soon.  ;)  :P

I don't see how it can. Honestly, I don't see how it's necessary for the case to proceed. This is a lawsuit over whether a petition to put a measure on the ballot was improperly dismissed on the grounds that it didn't contain enough signatures. The content of a series of sermons has no bearing on whether that's the case. If this was a lawsuit over the portion of the tax code dealing with religious entities and their prohibitions on political speech from the pulpit, I could see the relevance. Absent that, this is a gross misuse of the city attorney's powers.   Harris County, the most populous county in the state of Texas, only went for Obama in 2012 by about a thousand votes. When I consider that with everything that Annise Parker and the Houston city council have done in mind, I'm forced to wonder if Houston's city elections are really reflecting the will of the people.

[Hidden Content]   Well that's a pretty bold step.

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