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Volume XIV Number 22 - November 20, 2015     RSS Feed   

A Periodic Newsletter for Committed Texas Conservatives

In This Issue

HERO "Men In Women's Bathrooms" Not Dead In Houston Runoff Elections

Anti HERO Coalition: Lots Of Credit To Go Around

Houston Chronicle And President Obama Play Roulette With American Lives

The Barbarians Are Inside, and There Are No Gates By Mark Steyn

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Thoughts This Fortnight

HERO "Men In Women's Bathrooms"
Not Dead In Houston Runoff Elections

The people have overwhelmingly rejected the over-reaching HERO ordinance by 61% to 39%. Across the city, all groups said "No," yet the talk among supporters, led by Mayor Parker and her designated successor Sylvester Turner is that the voters were wrong and we will do this again. Obviously, Bill King is the answer for Mayor.

To finish the job started on November 3rd, we must elect candidates interested in getting the city back to basics and move on from HERO.

Coming next week, a list of those candidates committed to this course. Say "No" to the rest.

Anti HERO Coalition: Lots Of Credit To Go Around

It took a coalition to defeat the Parker-Turner HERO ordinance in Houston.

TCR fondly recalls one of President Reagan's important quotes, "There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit."

So who deserves credit: Campaign for Houston PAC (Dr. Steven Hotze), Houston Area Pastors Council (Pastor Dave Welch), Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Senator Paul Bettencourt, Jared Woodfill, the Link-Letter Terry Lowry, Texas Conservative Review, the Harris County Republican Party, and 61% of the voters.

Some out there are claiming "exclusive credit," which is not only inaccurate, but also wrong. Comments like the Harris County Republican Party's, "Our team's efforts defeated HERO..." are misleading and unhelpful. Share the credit, and be successful. Hoard the credit, and lose.

Houston Chronicle And President Obama
Play Roulette With American Lives

The recent Houston Chronicle editorial of November 17, 2015, criticizing Governor Greg Abbott for joining 31 other Governors in saying no to Syrian resettlement in their respective states is essentially the politically correct of the left risking our citizens' well-being based on our "rich tradition of taking refugees."

The problem with their attitude is that the alleged stringent security evaluations is a joke because we have no reliable information from Syria or the U.N., because the administration liberalized procedures last spring to make it easier to enter the country, and the FBI currently has over 1,000 active ISIS investigations in the U.S. (where do you think they came from?)

Governor Abbott got it right, security first. With confirmed vetting, refugees are fine, but not the sweep under the rug kind that is the pattern of this President.

When we are hit again by the Islamic Nazis, the Chronicle can explain why our lives were worth the risk for their liberal, politically correct principles. As for President Obama, his threat to veto any limitations on the importation of possible Muslim terrorists should be met by defunding his efforts. If Obama wants to veto the budget over that and shut down the government, he is totally responsible for it.

We can't conceive of any explanation that will satisfy the citizens of Texas or the American people.

The Barbarians Are Inside,
and There Are No Gates

By Mark Steyn

TCR Comment: The best article out of the Muslim terror attack in Paris is by Mark Steyn. He gets it. You need to read this if you care about our children's future in a free country.

As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri. I'm so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and blowing up everything I like - whether it's the small Quebec town where my little girl's favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave free-speecher who hosted me in Copenhagen ...or a music hall where I liked to go to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a couple of hours. But look at the photographs from Paris: there's nowhere to get away from it; the barbarians who yell "Allahu Akbar!" are there waiting for you ...when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go for a drink on a Friday night. They're there on the train... at the magazine office... in the Kosher supermarket... at the museum in Brussels... outside the barracks in Woolwich...

Twenty-four hours ago, I said on the radio apropos the latest campus "safe space" nonsense:

This is what we're going to be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.

Almost. When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to "solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?

With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.

Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.

Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.

Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".

But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is, is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.

And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.

And all Chancellor Merkel and the EU want to do is make that large comfort zone even larger by letting millions more "Syrian" "refugees" walk into the Continent and settle wherever they want. As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks in February:

I would like to ask Mr. Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr. Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...

...or soccer matches, or concerts, or restaurants...

To repeat what I said a few days ago, I'm Islamed out. I'm tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.

So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M. Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

So screw the candlelight vigil.


TCR on the Air

Red, White & Blue featuring TCR Editor Gary Polland and liberal commentator David Jones on Fridays at 7:30 pm on PBS Houston Channel 8.1, replaying Saturdays at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 8.1, Mondays at 11:30 pm on Channel 8.2 and on the web at www.houstonpublicmedia.org.

The current show as well as past shows are available on YouTube.

About Your Editor

Gary Polland is a long-time conservative and Republican spokesman, fund-raiser, and leader who completed three terms as the Harris County Republican Chairman. During his three terms, Gary was described as the most successful county Chairman in America by Human Events - The National Conservative Weekly. He is in his sixteenth year of editing a newsletter dealing with key conservative and Republican issues. The last fourteen years he has edited Texas Conservative Review. As a public service for the last 13 years, Gary has published election guides for the GOP primary, general elections and city elections, all with the purpose of assisting conservative candidates. Gary is also in his 14th year of co-hosting Red, White and Blue on PBS Houston, longest running political talk show in Texas history. Gary is a practicing attorney and strategic consultant. He can be reached at (713) 621-6335.

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