Veteran’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
A few more bits of 2014 election analysis:
Today 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:
The 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.
Doesn’t look like the American MSM have caught up, but Mexico’s National Palace appears to be on fire tonight:
#Mexico: The popular uprising
of the people continues!
The national palace burns!
#YaMeCanse
#Ayotzinapa pic.twitter.com/Kdc4GqnERs
— Insurrection News (@InsurrectNews) November 9, 2014
November 8, 2014, 43 days after 43 students disappeared by the State, Mexico’s National Palace burns. #FueElEstado pic.twitter.com/rf9Fu8JELG
— ThinkMexican (@ThinkMexican) November 9, 2014
Protests turn violent in Mexico amid word 43 missing college students were killed: http://t.co/7iStk0uGvI pic.twitter.com/7v8cMQlAgk
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 9, 2014
Government buildings are on fire in other parts of Mexico as well.
This is the combination of years of endemic corruption, stagnation and incompetence by the government (and especially the ruling PRI party), but most recently the deaths of 43 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa who were “abducted by police on order of a local mayor, and are believed to have been turned over to a gang that killed them and burned their bodies before throwing some remains in a river” just to keep the mayor from being embarrassed by their protests, was the match that set off the explosion.
Fun how people get upset when you kill off children for political reasons.
It seems that significant portions of Mexico are fire tonight, and America’s national media seems asleep at the switch…
A Friday LinkSwarm after a very eventful week…
Can You Hear Us Now? pic.twitter.com/nvaSsMe78n
— Bryan R.. (@youthpastorbry) November 6, 2014
Enjoy these two moderately lengthy dissections of liberal failures to turn Texas blue:
First, here’s this Jay Root/Texas Tribune piece by way of the Washington Post on why Wendy Davis lost the election. The piece soft-peddles Davis’ incompetence as a campaigner, and fails to mention her comparative unpopularity with Hispanics and the overall failure of the Democratic Party’s “War on Women” campaign strategy, of which Davis was a central piece, but is otherwise reasonably accurate.
Second, here’s a piece on just how comprehensive Battleground Texas’ failure was. It also goes into down-ballot failures for Battleground Texas that I haven’t had time to look at yet:
In House District 23, which even Republican Party of Texas Chairman Steve Munisteri had described as “neck-and-neck,” Democrat Susan Criss lost to Republican Wayne Faircloth by nearly 10 points. Rodney Anderson, the Republican candidate, bested Democrat Susan Motley by more than 12 points in House District 105. And incumbent state Rep. Philip Cortez, D-San Antonio, was toppled by Republican Rick Galindo, who lost by nearly 6 points.
The piece also notes that, for all the money Battleground Texas put into the Wendy Davis campaign, she finished a whopping two points above Democratic Agriculture Commissioner nominee Jim Hogan, who didn’t campaign at all.
Hat tip: Erick Erickson, who notes “bring down a bunch of liberal yankees who hate the ROTC, traditional values, the Alamo, and Texas itself and you’re setting the stage for disaster.” Also “Battleground Texas claims they are not going away. Thank goodness. They should stick around and serve as a money sink for guys like Tom Steyer lest that money go to other states.”
Erickson touches on something I want to expand upon, namely the obvious distaste in-state liberal elites show for all manner of Texas traditions. Even when they embrace “moderate” positions on, say, gun control or energy regulation, they give off the reek of patronizing condescension. You always get the impression that these people would rather be living in New York City or San Francisco than anyplace in Texas. No matter how much they proclaim a love of football, cowboy boots or country music, they always give the impression of going through the motions as a sop for those gun-toting redneck freaks of JesusLand. (Bob Bullock was probably the last major Texas Democrat who seemed like he wasn’t faking it, and Ann Richards was the last one who was able to fake it convincingly.) Their real constituents are not Texans, but the left-wing politicians, trial lawyers, national media and urban elites who make up the liberal overclass.
With all the votes in, we can start analyzing some of odder aspects of the Texas statewide race results.
For those watching the race, it’s no surprise that (discounting 2006’s strange four-way race) Wendy Davis was the worst-performing Democratic gubernatorial candidate this century. The surprising thing is that, as bad as she was, Davis was the Democrat’s best statewide candidate this year. Her 38.9% was the highest statewide vote percentage by any Texas Democrat in 2014. Leticia Van de Putte’s 38.7% was the second highest. Otherwise statewide Democratic candidates ranged from a low of 34.3% for invisible Senate candidate David Alameel to a high of 38% for Attorney General candidate Sam Houston.
Possible explanations:
And those who said Abbott would outpoll Dan Patrick were right…but only by 1.2%.
Abbott took ten counties that Bill White won in 2010: Harris, Bexar, Brooks, Culberson, Falls, Foard, Kleberg, La Salle, Reeves and Trinity. Harris (Houston) and Bexar (San Antonio) are the 800-pound gorillas on that list. In 2012, Ted Cruz won Harris by 2% (while Romney was edged there by a thousand votes) while losing Bexar by 4%. For a while Democrats were able to stay competitive statewide by racking up big margins in those urban counties even while they were losing rural and suburban counties. If Republicans can now win those counties outright, it may be a long, long time before a Democrat can win statewide again.
Two statewide Republican candidates got more votes than Abbott’s 2,790,227: Senator John Cornyn and Land Commissioner-elect George P. Bush. The rest of the country may suffer from Bush-fatigue (though I imagine that it’s now dwarfed by Obama-fatigue), but you’d be hard-pressed to find signs of it in Texas…
Since Democrats failed to contest three statewide court races, both the Libertarian and Green parties reached the minimum 5% threshold to maintain ballot access in 2016.
Shockingly, David Weigel actually brings the wood when discussing Battleground Texas:
“These are the greatest geniuses of data in the f**king world and they can’t figure out that less people voted?” asked Carney. “Every publicly pronounced goal of Battleground, every one, has been an abject failure.”
(snip)
Davis only out-performed the 2010 ticket in her home base of Tarrant County (Ft. Worth).
Oh, and it got worse. Abbott’s campaign said throughout the campaign that it would poach Latino voters, especially in the Rio Grande valley. A quick look at a Texas map might tell you that Abbott failed. Not quite true. Perry had lost Hidalgo County (McAllen) by 34 points; Abbott kept the margin down to 28 points. Perry had lost Webb County by 53 points; Abbott lost it by 39. In exit polling, Perry ended up pulling only 38 percent of the Latino vote. Abbott won 44 percent of it, about what was expected in a Texas Tribune poll that Davis allies tried to debunk. Abbott actually won Latino men, 50-49 over Davis. The Democratic wane and Republican outreach helped oust Rep. Pete Gallego, elected in 2012 in a district that sprawled across most of the border. He won 96,477 votes that year; he won only 55,436 this year, allowing black Republican Will Hurd to win, despite being out-fundraised 2-1.
Weigel may be a partisan, but at least he can read a spreadsheet…
A few quick post-election links: