Dana Loesch's Counterproductive Misdiagnosis

"For every man threw down his rod, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods."
Exodus 7:12

Dana Loesch is a friend of this website.  We've known each other for many years.  We've been on her show.

Thus, we appreciate her discussing Texas-specific challenges last night on Twitter.

Unfortunately, however, her diagnosis misses the mark.

Specifically, she says:

Hearing from numerous folks in different counties that they’re being out-organized by out-state funded progressive groups while the Texas GOP snoozes at the wheel. Many city council and other races. The feeling is that the state party isn’t taking it seriously.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

She's not wrong that this is a problem. But it's not one that's caused by the state party.  The state party are the ones trying to remedy the situation.

The problem, unfortunately, is that Republicans don't vote in local elections. Nothing more. Nothing less. There's only so much a political party can do when citizens are apathetic.

Furthermore, to make that accusation against a state party chairman who helped elect three Republicans to the Austin City Council is historically ignorant.

This is exactly how Cruz came so close to Beto last election. The ground organization effort is a disaster and I’ve spoken to a handful of veteran grassroots organizers who say they feel left out on their own to battle well-funded astroturfed efforts. No data sharing, nothing.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

Kinda sorta.

It's certainly true that O'Rourke's campaign did a good job turning out their soft supporters.  Their ground game certainly helped in that effort.  But, absent Cruz's catastrophic failures, none of that's relevant.

By all means, criticize the candidates from last fall (starting with Cruz), but it's hard to blame the state party when incumbent United States Senators are making bizarre comments about hair dye.

The party will ignore this at their own political peril and it won’t become evident until they have their backsides handed to them in 2020 and GOP lose any competitive change to regain the WH again. @TexasGOP needs to wake up and wake up fast. I’ll discuss on #DanaRadio tomorrow.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

More accurate statement: In 2020, the Texas GOP needs an affirmative record of accomplishments on which to run.  If that happens, they're fine.  They'll probably even pick up a few of the state rep seats they lost last fall.

Unfortunately, given where we are in the session, the odds of that happening are cloudy at best....

They did this in Colorado and in Nevada. Those who think it can’t and won’t happen (without strong counter organizing) in Texas are clueless and haven’t seen what’s been happening on the ground level — and in the most conservative districts.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

You can't organize if you don't have a record on which to run.

Wendy Davis and Beto were nothing more than GOTV vehicles to further seed certain Texas districts blue. They weren’t run to win, they were used as cash cows and for data building.

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 21, 2019

Perhaps, to a degree. Democrats certainly have more data than they did five years ago. But none of that matters if Republicans are giving their own voters a reason to show up.

Again, Dana's correct to recognize a problem.   We're glad she did.  But the problem is the elected officials, not the state party.

A few other points:

• Anyone who wants to understand why the left has newfound momentum in Texas needs to look at Trump.  Anyone who pretends otherwise is either foolish or in denial.  If reading that last sentence made you angry, then you're part of the problem.

• We wouldn't be in this mess if national conservative media hadn't spent the past decade giving Greg Abbott softball interviews.

• A word or two about election integrity (esp. in Dallas, Hays, and Travis counties) would have been helpful.

• There's still time to get these trends moving in the right direction during the current legislative session, if anyone wants to help.

Bottom Line: We appreciate the attention, we just wish it were focused on the real problem....

Movie Review: MY ALL AMERICAN (Warning: SPOILERS)

"I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith."
2 Timothy 4:7

As a Longhorn fan, we're embarrassed to admit we'd never heard the Freddie Steinmark story.  We're embarrassed further to admit that for as many dozens of times we've walked by the DKR Stadium Freddie Steinmark memorial pictured below, we never knew what it stood for.  That changed tonight when we saw Angelo Pizzo's MASTERPIECE My All American.

Freddie Steinmark (Finn Wittrock) was a safety on U.T's 1969 National championship team.  A believer from Colorado, as a football player he was undersized but he outworked and outhustled everyone else.  When no other team wanted to offer a scholarship to him, legendary U.T. Football coach Darryl K. Royal made him a Longhorn.

Freddie Steinmark emerged in 1968 following U.T's 6-4 1967 campaign.  Considering the 2015 team's 4-6 record, we were amused to hear Coach Royal explain: "A 6-4 record is unacceptable at the University of Texas."  Because of the mediocre season, Coach Royal went out of his way the next year to make spring and fall practices as physically onerous as possible.  Dozens of players disappeared.  Freddie Steinmark, by contrast, thrived to the point he became the starting safety as a sophomore.

With Steinmark on board, Coach Royal's 1968 squad ran the table during the final nine games, a montage to which the film dedicated considerable U.T. Football nostalgia.  We LOVED this part of the movie, though we admit to grading it with the home team advantage.  Just when you start to think things are going a little too well, however, Frankie Steinmark feels a sharp pain in his left leg heading into the 1969 season.

The 1969 season flips back and forth between the Longhorns' on-field success and Freddie Steinmark's deteriorating leg.  Steinmark helps lead the Longhorns through Oklahoma, Baylor, and A&M (sidenote: THOSE were the days).  But the leg continues to get worse.  The season ends with the #1 'Horns facing off against #2 Arkansas in the de facto national championship game.  Steinmark promises his girlfriend Linda (Sarah Bolger) he'll have a doctor check out his leg following the Arkansas meeting.  Steinmark plays heroically, if inconsistently, in the phenomenally well shot twenty minute national championship game scene.  Three days after the Longhorns win the national championship, Freddie Steinmark is diagnosed with fatal bone cancer in his left leg.

Following the diagnosis, Freddie Steinmark has his left leg amputated.  The final third of the movie chronicles his struggles with his faith, his family, and Coach Royal.  We won't go into too much detail, but this section is simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring.  We see the essential value of strong faith and a strong family.  Freddie Steinmark returns, one last time, to lead his teammates onto the field in the Cotton Bowl against Notre Dame.

Freddie Steinmark memorial in player's tunnel at DKR Stadium.

While we admit to grading with the home team advantage, we LOVED this movie.  My All American is inspiring for BOTH the grit with which Freddie Steinmark built his Football career and the grace with which he faced his illness.  A strong cast, strong direction, and strong writing make for captivating cinema.  We were impressed by the cinematography by which a film set in late 1960's Austin was shot in modern Austin (with a lot more high rise buildings).  Well worth watching.

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My All American official preview:



1969 U.T. - Arkansas national championship game:

Rolling Stone Magazine: Some Girls Have Penises

From our descent into Aldous Huxley territory, Rolling Stone reports on the movement to give radical hormone therapy to young children:

Building upon the gains of LGB activists, the trans-rights movement is having its moment, advancing more swiftly than even its advocates ever imagined. This past May, the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was updated to replace its old classification for trans people, "gender identity disorder," with "gender dysphoria," reflecting the new understanding that having a gender identity that doesn't match your birth anatomy doesn't make you mentally ill; only any associated distress is considered a problem. The diagnostic change was greeted within the tiny trans community – gender dysphoria is thought to affect as many as one in 10,000 people – as momentous a turning point as the DSM's 1973 declassification of homosexuality had been for gays. The increasing acceptance also sparked a new awareness of how early in life some people begin to realize they may have been born in the wrong bodies. 

.... 

If the trans movement is the LGBT's final frontier, then transgender youth represents its farthest outpost. Kids are coming out as trans earlier than ever: A survey of the San Francisco school district found that 1.6 percent of high school students and, incredibly, one percent of middle-school students identified as transgender. Children are packing the few U.S. clinics like Olson's, which are at the forefront of a new therapeutic approach, in which children may live as their preferred gender, complete with appropriate clothing, pronouns and often a new name. This so-called affirmative model has found an increasingly warm reception among the worried parents of trans children. And so while most doctors still consider this "social transition" for kids under the age of 10 to be controversial, already these intrepid young pioneers have begun venturing out into the world – including, in rare cases, female-to-male trans kids who undergo "top surgery" as early as age 13.   

As such, the trans-rights movement has speedily moved to a brand-new battleground: public schools. Although 623 American colleges and universities have already adopted nondiscrimination policies to cover gender expression, high schools and middle schools are being forced to grapple with the question of how to deal with trans students in their locker rooms, athletic fields and bathrooms. It's a haphazard fight raging at district, county and state levels; thus far, 2013 has been what appears to be a watershed year. This past winter, educators in Massachusetts, Maine and Portland, Oregon, issued guidelines to accommodate trans students, allowing them to use bathrooms and play on sports teams corresponding to the gender with which they identify. But in August, California trumped them all by becoming the first state to pass legislation spelling out that transgender students can choose which bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams they wish, based on their gender identity. 

.... 

And yet despite all the opposition, the movement toward early transition continues forward, driven largely by a school of thought within the medical community based around the idea of harm prevention. Indeed, studies show that the threat to transgender people is very real: One study showed more than half report being bullied in school; 61 percent are physically assaulted; 64 percent are sexually assaulted. Trans people have sky-high rates of unemployment, homelessness, substance abuse and suicide: Forty-one percent of transgender people attempt suicide, with trans teenagers the highest at-risk group. Given those staggering odds, many clinicians are anxious to try something – anything – that might mitigate that harm. [Emphasis Added]

Try anything, even if it gets cause and effect backwards!

But, dadgummit, common sense won't die:

But despite having jettisoned the old model, few health professionals are comfortable urging parents to let their preschooler pose as a different gender. There is not yet a standard screening model to separate the small percentage of truly trans kids from the merely gender-variant (though studies suggest that extreme dysphoria in early childhood can be a predictor of transgenderism). But gender nonconformity doesn't necessarily mean that the kid will turn out transgender: A 2012 Harvard School of Public Health study found that 85 percent of children who expressed some form of gender nonconformity actually grew up to not be LGB or T, but straight.

In the face of such superior logic:

The bluntness of her answer may have taken them aback: "The best way to explain it is, no bodies are the same. Some girls have penises and some boys have vulvas." 

[Emphasis Added]

Because if we don't normalize this behavior in childhood, it gets tricky:

Unlike kindergartners, who had a gender-neutral bathroom in their classroom, first-graders used the boys' and girls' bathrooms down the hall.... The terrifying prospect of this hypothetical older, maturer student was key to their analysis. As attorney William Kelly Dude would write in the accompanying position paper, while perhaps it seemed acceptable for a harmless six-year-old like Coy to enter the girls' room, he vividly described what a future infiltrator could look like: "a male high school student with a lower voice, chest hair and with more physically mature sex organs who claims to be transgender and demands to use the girls' restroom" – a menacing portrait of an impostor that echoed the threat of Focus on the Family's "Predator" ad. 

....

The prevailing train of thought from the affirmative camp goes like so: If these kids are truly trans, why should they endure the horrific transformation of developing the "wrong" adolescent body in puberty – a trans girl with an Adam's apple and a low voice; a trans boy coping with breasts and a monthly period – with all the wrenching emotional consequences, only to have to medically undo those changes later in life, with less-than-ideal results? Rather, a few clinics have adopted a series of medical interventions to delay puberty and then, later, give kids a smoother gender reassignment. The first step, sometimes as early as age nine, are medications called puberty blockers, which stave off secondary sex characteristics, buying families precious decision-making time until they feel sure of the child's wishes. Though concerns remain about whether kids on puberty blockers develop adequate bone density, pediatrician Olson says blockers are an effective low-risk tool when used for the short term: "The blockers allow us to push the pause button and let kids explore gender during what are really the most difficult years," adding that if kids ultimately decide not to continue the regimen, they could simply stop taking the meds, and anatomical puberty begins.

But it's not like they're showboating for the media:

Their efforts have been made easier by the fact that their discrimination complaint made Coy an overnight LGBT luminary, her story splashed in the pages of The New York Times and on Katie Couric's show. Over the past few months, Coy has stayed up well past her bedtime to appear at the red-carpet GLAAD awards and at a trans-rights fundraiser, events where strangers flocked to the Mathises to thank them, and share their own stories of discrimination. Jeremy has been so horrified to learn about the difficulties trans people routinely face – in the workforce, getting health insurance, in the housing market, and don't even get him started on incarcerated trans people – that he is about to begin law school, determined to become a civil rights lawyer. For Kathryn and Jeremy, their swift rebirth into champions of an underdog cause has imbued their lives with a new sense of forward motion. Thus, in a short time period, necessity and now passion have turned the Mathises into a couple invested enough in trans issues to have packed all five kids into their enormous wheelchair-accessible van for the two-and-a-half-day drive here to the annual Trans-Health Conference, on what amounts to their first family vacation.

All that being said, at least the piece closes with a paean to the Tenth Amendment:

The Mathises have moved an hour and a half away to Aurora, where they hope to get a fresh start in the more progressive Denver metropolitan area.

 Read the whole (INSANE) thing here.

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Personal Thought: It's a free country, and these people can raise their children however they see fit.  That being said, permitting their (obviously insane) choices, and celebrating them, are not the same thing.  We have a sad feeling that, over time, we will learn many of these children were abused to advance an agenda; it's happened before.

EXCLUSIVE: Colorado Republican Shares Hard Learned Lessons for Texas

(Author's Note: Sean Duffy is in the center of the picture, next to Santorum)

Today, Cahnman's Musings was blessed to speak for 45 minutes with Sean Duffy former deputy Chief of Staff to former Colorado Governor Bill Owens.  Almost a decade ago, Sean Duffy was a source of ours when we worked with Robert Novak.  During that time, the left was in the early stages of its takeover of Colorado.

Since the election of 2012, as the left has announced its intention to use the Colorado model in Texas, Cahnman's Musings thought back to those conversations we had with Sean Duffy in 2004 many times.  In 2004, there was something happening on the ground in Colorado that we did not understand at the time.  Having been on the front-lines of those battles, Sean Duffy shared his thoughts with Cahnman's Musings:



Highlights: 

Education -- Early in their rise to power, the left demagogued Education.

• In the Early 2000's education in Colorado was a mess.  Amendment 23, passed in 2000, created a mandate in the state constitution that required the state to spend at least inflation PLUS 1% on education.  This chaotic policy environment gave the left an opportunity to operate in Colorado in a way that doesn't exist in Texas today.

• In discussing education: "Moms and Dads like substance....There's ways to deal with this [education] in a substantive way where you can get Moms and Dads to focus."
• Author's Note: In Texas, that means School Choice, School Choice, and School Choice.

• "If we fight over dollars we lose, if we fight over substance we win."
•  Author's Note: I think that's the most important line in the whole interview.

Tactics of the Left

• The left likes to "create chaos and drop a piano on someone's head."

• The left systematically took out key Republicans in the state legislature by demogoguing particular votes and spending multiples of what had previously been spent in state legislative races; they knew who to pick off.
• Author's note: In Texas, my educated guess is that Donna Campbell and Giovanni Capriglione are the two most likely candidates.
• In a hilarious and ironic turn of events, this point might be the silver lining of Joe Straus' leadership. If there's one thing members of the Texas House know how to do, it's raise money and campaign.  No vulnerable Republican in the Texas House will ever lack for money.

• The left has "an extraordinary ground game"
• "The Left loves to go door-to-door."
•  Day in, day out, door-to-door organizing.
• Teachers "literally go door-to-door."
•  "We just don't do that"...."[W]e don't cultivate neighborhoods the way the left does."

•  Ken Salazar 2004:
• Ran as a moderate and was well liked.

•  "The spend a lot of time ripping our guys' heads off and we don't do as well in terms of finding the 1 or 2 message points that really unravels somebody in the public mind."

 Differences with Texas:

• Texas conservatives already have the seven capabilities; we can get a LOT better in how we deploy them, but we're building from a solid foundation.
• "This is the bread and butter of the left; they stand up organizations that do each of those things and they fund them."
• Intellectual Ammunition: Texas Public Policy Foundation.
• Mobilize for elections: Anyone who volunteered for Ted Cruz knows how many people were block-walking in 100 degree heat heading into that LATE JULY runoff!
• Pursuing investigations: Who uncovered CSCOPE?!?
• Strategic Litigation: Does the name Greg Abbott ring a bell?!?

•  Colorado was never the Republican stronghold that Texas is today.
• Bill Owens was the first Republican governor in 25 years.
• Ken Salazar was an incumbent state Attorney General before he was elected to the U.S. Senate; in Texas terms that would be like having Joaquin Castro serve alongside Rick Perry.
• In Texas, by contrast, no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994.

•  Entrepreneurs in the Minority communities.
• Texas conservatives have people like Rafael Cruz.

How you beat the left:

• "You've gotta get into the specifics of where the dollars are going and pound the crap out of them!"

Finally, via e-mail, Sean Duffy shares his thoughts on how conservatives, in general, can improve our messaging:

I just think we do so much better when we use emotion, and strong compelling narrative to back up our points.  Whether in charter schools or school choice, folks are moved by the plight of eager mothers who are fighting to get their kids educated.  We are moved by entrepreneurs who succeed despite humble beginnings.  More and more, it’s the narrative that has to be developed to bolster our policy points…particularly in the new media environment.

 Bottom Line: Texas conservatives must always remain vigilant, but we're a LOT better prepared for this fight than the left thinks we are.

Why Colorado Turned Blue (and the future of Texas) -- The Missing Link

"Colorado, what kind of pansy girls have you become?!?....We need some MEN in Texas."  Glenn Beck, Radio, March 5 2013, Bottom of the First Hour.

Last night, this diary on Redstate made the rounds.  It is a warning to Texans that Democrats can turn Texas blue the same way they turned Colorado blue in the mid-2000's.  There is another aspect of this story, however, that Texas Republicans would be well served to remember.

In 2002, National Review named (then) Colorado Governor Bill Owens America's Best Governor.  At the time, Owens had established a track record as a conservative reformer and he was re-elected by the largest margin in Colorado history.  At the time, Colorado had a strict spending cap known called the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR); more on that in a minute. Then came the budget battle of 2003 and, specifically, a fight over school finance.  During that battle, the left savaged Governor Owens.

Following that budget fight, Bill Owens lost his nerve.  In 2005, Bill Owens sold his soul to the Democrats and backed Prop. C, which gutted TABOR.  Gutting TABOR opened the floodgates of big government, and Colorado has since been hopelessly blue.

So, what does this mean for Republicans in Texas in 2013?!?

It means that money matters.  Beyond the obvious flaws, big government is also a money laundering scheme for the Democrat party.  When Colorado Republicans caved to the grow-government crowd, they signed their death warrant.

Ten days ago, we outlined big-ticket items for the 83rd Legislature: Texas Budget Compact, School Choice, Medicaid, Transparency, and Margins Tax Elimination.  The reason these five reforms are big ticket items is that, over they long-run, each keeps money in the hands of citizens and out of the hands of government.  Credit where its due, Texas Republicans had a good start to the week.

The key is to stay on public-policy offense.  If Texas Republicans do that, they'll be fine.  If they don't, they'll deserve what they get.

Update: A longtime Texas Political Observer writes in to add:

It's good to have outsiders such as the folks from Labor Union Report writing  articles, if only to create a sense of urgency for action. However:

 1) Unlike previous Democratic efforts in Texas that were built around remnants of Martin Frost’s congressional operation, Battleground Texas is almost entirely  out-of-state talent. Texas’ political culture is unlike DC or virtually any other state. If you don't understand the history and the nuances, you're going to make a fool of yourself. Even a couple of weeks in, it's obvious that these folks don't get Texas.

2) The Right already has the seven capacities in place in Texas. In fact, once we saw what the Left had done in Colorado, our side immediately moved to ensure that those seven capacities existed in Texas. Colorado was their proof of  concept, Texas is ours.

3) Texas Republicans have done far better with Hispanic voters than the party in most other states. If we can hang on to 35-40% of the Hispanic vote going forward, we'll be fine. Plus we're beginning to develop a good bench of Hispanic Republican officeholders throughout the state, including in heavily Hispanic regions.
 
4) To become the majority, Democrats have to make up 17 points at the statewide level, pick up 4 Senate seats when the only vulnerable one is theirs, and flip 21 House seats when their only real opportunities are in the cities of Dallas and Houston, which are declining in influence compared to their suburbs which are heavily Republican. They’ve maxed out in Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso, and the rural areas north of IH-10 are wholly conservative.
 
5) The Democrats have won zero statewide races since 1994 and have zero infrastructure outside the urban counties. Heck, there were close to 20 counties last year where they didn't conduct a primary because they couldn't find anyone willing to have their name listed as a county chairman. (The Republicans had primaries in all 254.) And the potentially viable statewide candidates in the Democrats’ pipeline can be counted on one hand.

6) The latest survey data indicates that 47 percent of Texans have “strongly unfavorable” opinions of the President.
 
If conservatives totally mess things up, Texas could turn purple in 2022. But it would have to be total.