Or rather I would, if it were available anywhere in Texas, and it wasn’t made in a country currently occupying parts of Ukraine:
Yes, Red Army Vodka in a bottle shaped like an AK-47. It’s much classier than their previous bottle:
Now I Know What To Get Dwight for Christmas
November 15th, 2014Battleground Texas Pledges We’ll Be Able To Kick Them Around Some More in 2016
November 13th, 2014Battleground Texas says we’ll have it to kick around in 2016:
The head of Battleground Texas is telling supporters that despite an Election Day-shellacking, the group plans to stay put for the next round of elections in 2016. In a memo posted on the group’s website, executive director Jenn Brown says Battleground Texas is analyzing what went wrong. “I know that the losses last week were tough, and there has been a lot of negativity in the aftermath of the election. But I want you to look forward with me. Because we have work to do,” said Brown.
Funny how pouring tens of millions of dollars into a state, only for Democrats lose even more badly than they did four years ago, might be perceived as “negative.”
Also: “[Wendy] Davis raised money for her campaign field operation and Battleground Texas spent it. According to campaign finance reports, nearly $400,000 went to a Chicago consulting firm, 270 Strategies, headed by Jeremy Bird, who helped create Battleground Texas.”
So no matter how badly Davis did, I guess the campaign was a rousing success for Bird.
That piece also says that Battleground Texas can work with millionaire lawyer Steve Mostyn’s Ready for Hillary super-PAC. I’m having trouble thinking of scenarios where Hillary could win Texas that don’t involve the phases “complete breakdown of civilization” and “widespread cannibalism”…
And Here Come the Wendy Davis Campaign Recriminations!
November 13th, 2014You don’t have such a high profile campaign flame-out as Wendy Davis for Governor without either some spectacular mismanagement within the ranks of the campaign, or a truly abysmal performance by the candidate themselves. While Wendy Davis certainly turned in an awful performance, it alone wasn’t the epic meltdown (I’m thinking Edmund Muskie’s tears or Rick Perry’s 2012 brain freeze) needed to derail a campaign all by itself.
No, the Davis campaign offered up a veritably ecology of dysfunction.
When a campaign fails this dramatically, the insider recriminations start popping up on why the disaster wasn’t their fault to keep the debacle from staining their own resumes. And now we have the first example from the Davis campaign.
“Consultants for Democrat Wendy Davis warned her campaign months ago that the Fort Worth senator was headed for a humiliating defeat in the Texas governor’s race unless she adopted a more centrist message and put a stop to staggering internal dysfunction.”
I once saw Staggering Internal Dysfunction open for No Controlling Legal Authority at Lollapalooza…
“The warnings are contained in two internal communications obtained by The Texas Tribune and written at the beginning of the year by longtime Democratic operatives Peter Cari and Maura Dougherty.”
So it would be Cari and Dougherty who want the world to know that “this huge, stinking debacle wasn’t our fault!”
“Addressed to then-Campaign Manager Karin Johanson, the memo warned that the Davis campaign had ‘lurched to the left,’ was failing to communicate a positive message and offered virtually nothing to the swing voters the senator would need to win statewide.”
Karin Johnson would be pushed out of the campaign on June 11. And just because the advice comes from two Democratic campaign operatives trying to save their own bacon doesn’t mean it’s not true.
“The Prism consultants concluded that the campaign was either desperately broken or that the hierarchy had decided to portray Davis not as a Texas moderate but rather a ‘national Democrat, appealing to liberal donors in the mistaken belief that there is a hidden liberal base in Texas that will turn out to vote if they have a liberal candidate to support.'”
Liberals are particularly good at this specific type of self-delusion.
The Davis campaign was always going to have a particularly difficult challenge: how to suck up big-buck donations from the national pro-abortion network while still appearing moderate enough to get elected in Texas. It was probably an impossible one, but the Davis campaign certainly could have done a much better job than they did. Instead they made mistake after mistake and launched a series of dishonest and counterproductive attack ads against Abbott. (In this the Davis 2014 campaign made the same mistake as the Dewhurst 2012 campaign, preferring to run attack ads based on nothing rather than any sort of positive ads whatsoever.)
Davis was the wrong candidate at the wrong time who ran the wrong campaign in the wrong state.
Expect more recriminations of this type to surface in the coming weeks…
More Violence in Mexico
November 12th, 2014In a follow-up to my previous pieces, protestors have set fire to the ruling PRI party’s building in the state of Guerrero. Also, I missed this earlier, but the U.S. state department has warned Americans away from most of Guerrero.
Violent clashes between police and protestors in Acapulco:
Here’s author Alfredo Corchado on the situation is Mexico. “I think what happened in Guerrero confirms everything. The situation is very clear. There’s corruption among the authorities with the drug cartels, the organized crime.”
And here’s a photo gallery. Ignore the dumbass Ferguson comparison.
More than isolated incidents, less than a revolution…
Guns and Crime Round for November 11, 2014
November 11th, 2014Veteran’s Day seems like a good time to have another gun and crime roundup. Includes some stuff held from before the election:
Mr. Richard Overton, the oldest living veteran. Kids, do not play on his lawn. pic.twitter.com/VQ0twXRdi1
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 10, 2014
More Post-Election Tidbits
November 10th, 2014A few more bits of 2014 election analysis:
“Tear down this wall!”
November 9th, 2014Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.
Communism is evil, no ifs, and or buts, and the dramatic difference between freedom and slavery on different sides of the Iron Curtain was too stark for any but the most blinkered leftists to ignore. Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher (among many others) all saw that difference clearly and worked to bring it down. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the end not only for East Germany and the Warsaw Pact, but the Soviet Union as well. Freedom won and tyranny lost.
Here’s the relevant passage from Reagan’s speech:
And here are scenes of the wall coming down:
Mexico Burning Followup
November 9th, 2014The news reports are downplaying last night’s Mexican protests, saying they only succeeded in setting the front door of the ceremonial National Palace alight.
The dramatic pictures of burning trucks appear to be from Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero, which also contains Ayotzinapa, where the massacred students hailed from.
There are also reports of the PRI Mayor in Oaxaca authorizing police to fire on protestors.
Vaguely related: A New York Times reporter gets shaken down by a crooked cop in Mexico.