Mexico’s drug war is one of those news stories that’s been crowded off America’s front pages by the tide of #FakeNews. How can the MSM find time to cover dead Mexicans if Donald Trump’s doorman might have once talked to a Russian?
I say “drug war” but that should probably be “drug wars,” in that each government crackdown on particular cartels, wars between rival cartels, and wars between different factions of the same cartel are all different events, and different parts of Mexico experience explosive violence and relative calm at different times. Juarez, the Mexican city just across the border from El Paso, experienced horrific drug violence between 2008 and 2012, peaking at 3,766 homicides in 2010, dropping back to 256 in 2015. (By contrast, in 2010 El Paso had a total of five murders.)
in 2017, a newly hot drug war is roiling Mexico just south of the border patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector. “The Reynosa faction of the Gulf Cartel lost its boss, Comandante Toro or Juan Manuel Loaiza Salinas aka Julian Loiza Salinas. The death sparked violent infighting and clashes with Mexican authorities. Residents in the area were forced to live under complete control of Toro, with even the news outlets having to answer to him.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
There are five border control sectors that cover Texas, from East to West: Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio, Marfa, and El Paso. Reynosa is directly south of McAllen.
At least 36 people have been killed in drug violence in Reynosa alone this year. Just this week, they machine gunned to death a seven year old boy during a failed carjacking.
In other drug cartel news:
Just today, eight members of the La Familia drug cartel in Austin and San Antonio were sentenced to prison:
Oscar Maldonado, 32 of Austin, was sentenced to 78 months in prison.
Julio Rogel, 20 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
Jose Duenas, 35 of Austin, was sentenced to 60 months in prison.
Jorge Arellano, 36 of Austin, was sentenced to 88 months in prison.
Javier Jaimes, 28 of Austin, was sentenced to 72 months in prison.
Javier Alvarez, 26 of San Antonio, was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
Jaime Carbajal, 26 of Austin, was sentenced to 42 months in prison.
Hugo Rodriguez, 31 of Austin, was sentenced to 70 months in prison.
“Investigators found 75 kilograms of methamphetamine during their investigation, along with nine kilograms of cocaine and around $175,000 in cash.” Three more members await sentencing.
During the dawn of cable TV, CNN had real impact. No longer did you have to wait until 6 PM for updates on national stories. Crossfire, featuring Tom Braden on the left and Patrick Buchanan on the right, was hugely influential, though nobody realized it would degenerate into the “talking heads screaming at each other” format that infects so much of cable news today.
But as time went on, CNN drifted leftward, partially due to founder Ted Turner’s own leftward drift, partially due to the overall media trends. Bill Clinton’s personal friend Rick Kaplan ran the network from 1997-2000, during which time CNN attacked Clinton’s critics and defended Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In 2003, CNN news chief Eason Jordan admitted he had downplayed Iraqi atrocities in order to maintain access.
CNN’s increasing leftwing tilt was one of the reasons the upstart Fox News Network surpassed CNN’s ratings in 2002 and never looked back. But the 2016 Presidential Election was when CNN finally gave up even the pretense of objectivity, earning their Clinton News Network nickname and developing a full-blown case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It didn’t help that CNN freely exchanged DNA with the Democratic Party: Chris Cuomo, Laura Jarrett, and Virginia Moseley (CNN Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief married to Obama Deputy Secretary of State Tom Nides) to name but three.
Given all that, it’s no great surprise that CNN has spent inordinate amounts of time pushing the Trump Russia conspiracy theory. CNN has probably mentioned Russia more in the last eight months than they did in eight years during the Obama Administration.
Three CNN employees “resigned” over another Trump Russia conspiracy theory story (this one about a Russian investment fund run by Anthony Scaramucci being under federal investigation) that was so bad CNN had to retract and delete it. Those “resigning” include Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Frank (not the What’s the Matter With Kansas guy), Eric Lichtblau, who CNN recently hired away from the New York Times, and Lex Haris, executive editor of CNN Investigates. (That, in turn, lead to one of the most CNN things ever: CNN refusing to comment to CNN reporter about CNN story retraction. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.))
Then CNN producer John Bonifield was caught on camera by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas admitting that there’s no smoking gun to the “Russia hacked the election” fantasy, and that CNN CEO Jeff Zucker is only pushing the Russia narrative for ratings.
At the end of the video, O’Keefe promises more videos to come on CNN.
Now the question becomes whether CNN wants to continue destroying what’s left of its reputation in pursuing its fantasy of a Russia Trump conspiracy, or whether it would like to return to actually reporting the news rather than trying to manufacture it.
(Note: I almost wrote “its white whale of a Russia Trump conspiracy,” but then I realized that was the wrong metaphor. After all, in Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick actually exists… )
Update: Just after I posted this, the second Project Veritas CNN video dropped, in which CNN on-air personality admitted that the Russia story was a “big nothingburger”:
A funny thing happened on the way to total Social Justice Warrior cultural domination: They finally started paying a price for their “violent eliminationist rhetoric.”
More and more, it seems that being a left-wing racist asshat is an excellent way to earn yourself a pink slip:
In a followup to an item in last week’s LinkSwarm, Phil Montag, the Nebraska Democrat openly celebrating the shooting of Steve Scalise wasn’t just fired from his Nebraska Democratic Party gig, he was also fired from his day job.
The University of Delaware cut ties with part-time, adjunct faculty member Katherine Dettwyler, who said that North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier deserved to die at the hands of communist North Korean abuse since he was “young, white, rich, clueless.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
Essex County College fired adjunct professor Lisa Durden for statements attacking white people and supporting pro-black segregation. “You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white-privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration.” Said Essex County College president Dr. Anthony Munroe (who himself is black): “Racism cannot be fought with more racism.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Yale dean June Y. Chu loses her job after calling people ‘white trash‘ in her Yelp reviews. (Aside: When did the New York Times start putting in Chinese ideogram subheadlines at the top of every story?)
in all these cases, merely refraining from being complete asshats would have been sufficuent for the offenders to keep their jobs.
Do we want to live in a world where people can be fired from their day jobs for unrelated Yelp reviews? Probably not. But as IowaHawk once observed:
I'm sure the Drexel prof's "white genocide" crack was just an ill-delivered joke, but I didn't set the ancient Twitter Outrage Mob rules
Until very recently, left wing Social Justice Warrior mobs were allowed to go after people’s livelihoods with impunity for the most trivial of politically incorrect infractions, confident that no matter how radical or racist their own words and deeds, that they would pay no price for it. Only recently have the same rules Social Justice Warriors apply to others been applied to themselves. Only when the pain of their own reckless attack mob mentality is inflicted on them will they stop.
Finally, the rest of the world is punching back twice as hard, and radical leftists have no one to blame but themselves.
If pink slips are the only language they understand, then pink slips it is.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to allow a limited version of President Trump’s ban on travelers from six mostly Muslim countries to take effect and will consider in the fall the president’s broad powers in immigration matters in a case that raises fundamental issues of national security and religious discrimination.
The court made an important exception: It said the ban “may not be enforced against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
In the unsigned opinion, the court said that a foreign national who wants to visit or live with a family member would have such a relationship, and so would students from the designated countries — Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — who were admitted to a U.S. university.
The court said it would hear the case when it reconvenes in October. But it also indicated in the ruling that things may change dramatically by then. It asked the parties to address whether the case would be moot by the time it hears it; the ban is supposed to be a temporary one while the government reviews its vetting procedures.
My quick reading is that they thought the lower courts overstepped their bounds, but issued a split-the-difference ruling in hopes that the entire issue would work itself out politically and spare them from having to wade into the dense thicket of potential political and constitutional issues.
All the Justices voted for a stay in part, while Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch arguing further for a stay in full.
The battle for the Islamic State capital of Raqqa continues. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces continue to advance, but recently met a fierce counterattack featuring drones, snipers, car bombs and minefields.
Here are some videos on the fighting, all from foreign sources, since the American MSM evidently cant be arsed to spare anyone from their Russian Conspiracy Story divisions to cover an actual war American-backed forces are fighting.
Reportedly the Syrian Democratic Forces are just a few hundred meters from the old city, where the Islamic State has dug in for a final battle, and has a network of tunnels to move throughout the city.
This is a longer video from about a week ago that also includes an interview with a French Middle East expert on the situation.
Have Democrats finally, finally, finally gotten sick and tired of Nancy Pelosi?
It’s been a decade since Pelosi ascended to the speaker’s chair, and since Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, there have been mutterings that Pelosi is a drag on the party. Despite that, she’s continues to get elected as Minority Leader.
But following Jon Ossoff’s loss in the Georgia 6th Congressional District special election, that finally seems to be changing:
Democrats’ embarrassing special-election loss in Georgia, after the liberal media built up unrealistic expectations, has provoked a wave of bitter blowback that targets House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
Snip.
On Wednesday, some Democratic members of Congress publicly voiced concerns about Pelosi, raising the specter of a leadership challenge.
“I think you’d have to be an idiot to think we could win the House with Pelosi at the top,” Rep. Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat, told Politico.
“Nancy Pelosi is not the only reason that Ossoff lost, but she certainly is one of the reasons.
Representative Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, reportedly met Wednesday morning with a group of lawmakers who have been conferring about economic messaging, according to several people present who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Luján told the group that his committee would examine the Georgia results for lessons, but he urged the lawmakers to portray the race in positive terms in their public comments, stressing that Democrats have consistently exceeded their historical performance in a series of special elections fought in solidly Republican territory.
It was in the meeting with Mr. Luján that Mr. Cárdenas, a member of the Democratic leadership, brought up Ms. Pelosi’s role in the Georgia race, calling it “the elephant in the room.”
Ms. Pelosi was not present.
On the front page of liberal heartland Silicon Valley’s paper, The Mercury News of San Jose: “Question: Is Nancy Pelosi the problem?”
“Some of the toughest ads against the 30-year-old [Georgia Dem candidate Jon] Ossoff were those tying him to Pelosi, whose approval ratings are underwater outside California.”
Furthermore, as NYTimes reports, in a possible omen, the first Democratic candidate to announce his campaign after the Georgia defeat immediately vowed not to support Ms. Pelosi for leader.
Joe Cunningham, a South Carolina lawyer challenging Representative Mark Sanford, said Democrats needed “new leadership now.”
Even Democrats who are not openly antagonistic toward Ms. Pelosi acknowledged that a decade of Republican attacks had taken a toll: “It’s pretty difficult to undo the demonization of anyone,” said Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. of New Jersey.
So with all that said, we are left with one question, as The Economic Collapse blog’s Michael Snyder asks, are the ‘toxic’ Democrats destine to become a permanent minority party?
Every political generation needs a “designated hate object” on the other side. In the early 1990s, a joke went around Republican circles about a direct mail guy: “I had the most horrible dream! Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy went down in the same plane!”
But Jackson and Kennedy were clearly to the left of center in a Democratic Party that still included some conservatives and moderates, and neither had any formal leadership role in the party, Jackson never having held office and Kennedy having lost his role as Majority Whip to Robert Byrd in 1971).
By contrast, Pelosi is not an ideological outlier in her Party, but emblematic of it. As Minority Leader, Pelosi is arguably the highest ranking elected Democrat in the country right now.
The reason Pelosi was able to be elected Speaker in the first place is that Howard Dean’s “50 state strategy” helped empower a lot of moderate Democrats to run and win (at least during a wave election) in deep red states, the last gasp of the “Blue Dog Democrats.” Then Pelosi ruthlessly pushed the Stupak bloc flippers into betraying their pledges on the ObamaCare vote, and the aftermath of 2010 wiped most of them out. The congressional careers of Brad Ellsworth, Bart Stupak, James Oberstar, Steve Driehaus, Steve Chabot, Charles Wilson (the Ohio rep, not the Texas one), Kathy Dahlkemper, Paul Kanjorski and Solomon Ortiz died for Nancy Pelosi’s sins. Moreover, the uniformity of far left ideology in the current Democratic Party prevents anyone like them from running in and winning a Democratic primary.
Stopping Trump is imperative, so long as it doesn’t require the party rethinking its uncompromising stance on abortion, guns or immigration. Every old rule should be thrown out in the cause of the resistance—except the tried-and-true orthodoxies on social issues.
If Democrats had to choose between opposing an honest-to-goodness coup and endorsing a ban on abortion after 20 weeks, they’d probably have to think about it. And if they dared pick opposition to the coup, NARAL Pro Choice America would come after them hammer and tongs.
Those issues, and the unpopularity of ObamaCare, and the relentless Social Justice Warrior madness, etc., are what’s hurting the Democratic Party.
Pelosi has put down rebellions in her ranks before, but this one seems more widespread. Also, Pelosi is 77, and has recently started to have more senior moments than she used to.
Still, something tells me that House Democrats lack the guts to oust Pelosi mid-session. But if Democrats do badly in next year’s midterms, then the knives might really come out…
A former State Department employee was arrested Thursday and charged with espionage for allegedly transmitting Top Secret and Secret documents to a Chinese government agent, according to an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA.
Kevin Mallory, 60, of Leesburg is a self-employed consultant who speaks fluent Chinese. Court filings show that Mallory was an Army veteran who worked as a special agent for U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service from 1987 to 1990. Since then, Mallory has worked for various government agencies and defense contractors, maintaining a Top Secret security clearance. The Washington Post reports that Mallory was also an employee of the CIA.
We do know that Wednesday’s congressional attacker, James Hodgkinson, shared a conspiracy-tinged Change.org link on March 22, accompanied by the caption, “Trump is a traitor.” Once again, it has to be stressed that this information is woefully insufficient to conclude that the perpetrator was motivated by Russia-oriented conspiracy theories. Motivations are multifaceted, and often political beliefs “intersect” with mental distress, causing people to act violently. But the sharing of the link does indicate that Hodgkinson has been affected by the frenzied climate Democrats have stoked around the Russia issue.
Once again, for extra emphasis: calling attention to the link Hodgkinson shared is not to say that Democrats are directly culpable for this shooting. That would be ridiculous. But the shared link does show that he was to some extent enmeshed in the conspiratorial paranoia that Democrats have knowingly fostered, at full-blast, for approaching an entire year. One ancillary consequence of fostering conspiratorial paranoia for a full year is that certain people with unstable mental predispositions may latch on and commit violent acts. But Democrats and liberals, in their self-assuredness, have been reticent to acknowledge this byproduct of their current political strategy. Proclaiming that the president engaged in treason — as many members of Congress and media figures have — is going to have an influence on the broader public, and included in that broader public are people who might be deranged and/or have violent inclinations.
If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months — warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration — can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself.
Democrats want a resistance. They want to impeach the President. They want full-blown socialism. They want to go further to the left than the tea party wanted to go right. A lot of activist Democrats are already interpreting Jon Ossoff’s loss as him not being aggressively anti-Trump enough.
The Democrat base has moved way further left than where the American public is and at a time we seem to be in a pendulum swing back to the right, that could hurt them. As they start challenging Democrat incumbents with more liberal activists and start winning primaries in swing seats with radical progressives, they risk their ability to win.
What makes this fun to watch is knowing they reject that idea and think the more radical and more militant the more likely their candidates will win. I cannot wait to watch their slate of moonbat crazy challengers.
All those “Ossoff’s loss was a moral victory” excuses? Vox says don’t believe it: “Don’t sugarcoat it — Ossoff’s loss is a big disappointment, and a bad sign, for Democrats. Democrats need to outperform Hillary Clinton to take back the House. Ossoff did worse than her.”
“A professor at a Connecticut college said he was forced to flee the state after he received death threats for appearing to endorse the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims ‘f**king die’ instead of treating them.” Step right up, Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams! You’re the next contestant on “Trump Derangement Syndrome Ruined My Life!”
“This May was the Democratic National Committee’s worst May of fundraising since 2003. The DNC raised $4.29 million in May of this year, according to data recently released by the Federal Election Commission. It is the weakest take for national Democrats since May of 2003, when the party raised a paltry $2.7 million.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
TPPF’s Chris Jacobs is not impressed with the Republican Senate ObamaCare replacement bill. TPPF’s Chip Roy said:
Simply put, the bill doubles down on the fundamentally flawed architecture of Obamacare and if implemented, will neither increase the actual care available to the people nor drive down the cost of care or insurance. It maintains Obamacare’s subsidy regime, retains almost the entirety of the regulatory architecture driving up people’s premiums and deductibles, continues the previous Administration’s unconstitutional bailouts to insurers, and maintains the Medicaid expansion for five more years before slowly attempting to reform the program.
Liberal lawyer Alan Dershowitz states that Presidnet Trump’s tape bluff is perfectly legal. “What President Trump did was no different from what prosecutors, defense attorneys, policemen, FBI agents and others do every day in an effort to elicit truthful testimony from mendacious witnesses.” Also: “We must declare an armistice against using our criminal justice system as a political weapon in what has become a zero-sum bloodsport.”
“Trump Imposes New Sanctions on Russia Over Ukraine.” Insert record scratch sound over derailment of the “Trump is Putin’s stooge” narrative here. Oh, also, New York Times: When you invade, occupy and annex territory, it’s not an “incursion,” it’s an “invasion.”
Helmut Kohl, the chancellor who oversaw German reunification, dead at age 87. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light. The cost has fallen by a factor of 500,000 and the quality of that light has transformed from unstable and risky to clean, safe, and controllable.”
“A mentally ill homeless woman in Florida is accused of vandalizing a policeman’s patrol car and smearing feces on a church where she left the walls defaced with nonsensical writings against ‘patriarchy.'”
The extraordinarily high prosecutorial burden of proof in any criminal trial is intentionally designed to heavily favor defendants, because we long ago embraced as a society Blackstone’s principle. Formulated in the seventeen-sixties by the English jurist William Blackstone, the presumption is that it is better to have ten guilty people go free than that one innocent person suffer. Hard as it is to stomach today, embracing that calculus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to mention terrorists and murderers) to go free in order to protect the one falsely accused. Unfortunately, Cosby is one of those to escape criminal punishment. And, to put a fine point on the over-all gendered impact of requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the inevitable effect of the heavy tilt toward defendants is that in sexual-assault trials, which involve mostly male defendants and mostly female accusers, men are favored over women.
It’s been a while since I last reported on the wheels of justice continuing to grind in the aftermath of the May 17, 2015 Waco biker shootout. The grinding is more glacial than slow, not only are they not grinding exceedingly fine, right now they don’t seem to be grinding at all.
With the trial of Bandidos member Christopher Jacob Carrizal delayed, the trial of Cossacks member Kyle Smith was supposed to start June 5.
A judge on Friday effectively postponed the start of any Twin Peaks biker trials in McLennan County until after the federal trial of Bandidos national leaders in San Antonio or until federal prosecutors agree to share evidence with McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna.
Judge Matt Johnson of Waco’s 54th State District Court granted a motion to delay the June 5 trial of Kyle Smith, 50, an air-conditioning technician from Kilgore and member of the Cossacks motorcycle group.
I would say that further delay starts to raise Sixth Amendment issues, but in fact, since it’s been more than two years since the shootout, those factors were already in play. I’m hardly an expert, but Orand vs. State and Barker vs. Wingo seem to be the relevant precedents here. Both cases involve balancing factors for speedy trial issues. The defendant in Orand was acquitted after a 12-year delay between indictment and the arrest, while the five years Barker waited for trial (during which an accomplice was tried five times before a conviction was obtained) was not considered excessive, partially because Barker had not asserted his right to a speedy trial.
Given the large, complex cases against the numerous Waco biker shootout defendants, the judicial system is more likely to make allowances, despite the fact that none of them have been charged with murder.
There are, however, a few tidbits of news related to the case:
William Richardson, a biker who was shot at the Waco shootout but not charged, is suing to recover medical expenses. Named in the suit are “Twin Peaks Investment; Front Burner Restaurant GP; former Waco Police Chief Brent Stroman; Waco police Detective Manuel Chavez; McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara; and an unknown officer identified in the lawsuit as John Doe.”
One of the arguments in the lawsuit is one we’ve heard before: that Waco police refused to render medical aid:
The lawsuit claims the deaths of nine bikers and injuries to at least 20 others were compounded by the mass arrests “and wrongful detention of innocent individuals.”
“During this period of detention, prior to transporting the detained off scene, neither law enforcement officers under control of defendant Chavez, defendant Stroman or defendant McNamara rendered aid to detainees who were injured nor did they call for emergency medical assistance,” the suit alleges.
Richardson was not provided immediate medical attention by restaurant or law enforcement officials, the lawsuit claims.
But one Bandidos member has been convicted in a murder case involving a bar fight with a Cossack. A different bar fight:
About 20 members of the Bandidos, one of the most notorious outlaw motorcycle clubs in Texas, poured into the front and rear doors of Gator’s Jam Inn in Fort Worth on a Friday evening in early December 2014. Reports of gunfire soon followed. “There’s been 15 shots so far, and they’re still shooting,” one of several 911 callers reported to Fort Worth police.
The Bandidos’ Fort Worth chapter president, Howard Wayne Baker, was one of three arrested in connection with the shooting. He was charged with engaging in organized crime and directing the activities of a street gang. On Tuesday, the 62-year-old was sentenced to 45 years for one charge and 40 years for the other, to be served concurrently in prison.
Fort Worth police said that in 2014, the Fort Worth Bandidos ambushed three rival outlaw motorcycle clubs — the Cossacks, the Ghost Riders and the Wino’s Crew — at the bar. When the smoke cleared, Geoffrey Brady, a 41-year-old member of the Ghost Riders, had been shot in the head, and two others also sustained injuries.
“They dragged Brady out of the front door and executed him in front of his wife and friends,” said Allenna Bangs, Tarrant County assistant district attorney, in Baker’s trial last week. “They stood over him in a circle, and Howard Baker was standing in that circle.”
On May 8, there was also another Waco bar shooting involving Bandidos affiliates. Evidently seven members of a unnamed biker group affiliated with the Bandidos assaulted a man, the man pulled a gun and started firing, and then everybody ran away.
Bandidos were also involved in a violent gang brawl in Australia.
This morning, following yet another special election defeat, chastised Democrats are doing a lot of soul searching as to why voters keep rejecting their message.
Ha, just kidding! They’re calling voters “toxic bigots.”
First up: Feminist Jill Filipovic, who is not happy at all that Karen Handel has shattered a “glass ceiling” by becoming the first woman from Georgia elected [Correction: First Republican woman] to the U.S. House of Representatives:
At what point is this not a failure of Democrats but toxic, vindictive voters willing to elect hateful bigots? https://t.co/EYNDuzxzGL
Democrats and progressives were convinced they had a chance to win this race, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that their real problem is that they don’t actually know where they can win. They’re walking around with a false sense of their own electability — just seven months after they were convinced Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election easily.
Yes, there’s a lot of road ahead, and there will be easier districts for Democrats to win in 2018. But when you add up all the spending and use the most recent numbers reported in the New York Times, it calculates to a $9 million advantage for the Democrats. ($23.6 million raised by Ossoff + $7.6 million spent by outside groups preferring him = $31.2 million; $4.5 million spent by Handel + $18.2 million spent by outside groups preferring her = $22.7 million.)
If you fall short in an open-seat special election, in a district Trump barely carried, with a candidate who avoids gaffes and with a giant spending advantage . . . just where the heck are you going to win?
Democrats show show no sign of learning a lesson from this defeat: “I don’t think Democrats understand that their *Resistance* strategy is not working. But they are so emotionally invested in it, they can’t see their way out.”
Another big loser from last night: Planned Parenthood. “By tacking a $735,000 price tag onto Ossoff’s failed effort, Planned Parenthood has revealed its own futility at influencing elections.”
Six reasons Democrats lost GA-6. Including carpetbagging and nationalizing the race with outside money. “Ossoff received more money from California than Georgia. Voters took it as an insult, and acted accordingly.” Also: “The GA-6 may be an upscale, suburban district, but voters there still aren’t interested in Alyssa Milano’s take on politics.” (Hat tip: Big Gator 5’s twitter feed.)
Mr. Ryan, who tried to unseat Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, as House minority leader after the November elections, said she remained a political drag on other Democrats. Ms. Handel and Republican outside groups tied Mr. Ossoff to Ms. Pelosi in campaign events and television ads, casting him as a puppet for what they described as her liberal agenda and “San Francisco values.”
“They’re still running against her and still winning races, and it’s still a problem,” Mr. Ryan said.
More on the same theme: “Republican operatives say that 98 percent of voters in the 6th District already had an impression of Pelosi when they conducted their first internal poll, and she was 35 points underwater. When presented with the choice of whether they wanted a representative who would work with Paul Ryan or Pelosi, six in 10 picked the Speaker and three in 10 picked the minority leader.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As long as Democrats’ desire to win elections takes a backseat to their need for moral preening over their own “tolerance” and their emotional need to label voters who reject their policies as racists and bigots, expect them to continue losing elections…
Newspapers around the country are erasing their HUGE UPSET REBUKE TO TRUMP headlines to replace them with WILD NIGHT OF NBA TRADES! and relegating the Georgia’s 6th news back to A8…
In another special election, Republicans, as expected, held on to South Carolina’s 5th District, with Republican Ralph Norman beating Democrat Archie Parnell in a closer-than-expected race for the seat vacated by Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
Except for retaining the overwhelmingly Democratic California 34th Congressional District, Democrats seem O-for-Everything in special elections in the Trump era…
