On
Wednesday, powerful Democrat Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney conceded to
Republican Mike Lawler in New York’s 17th congressional district. The
loss was a crushing blow to Democrats, who faced a remarkably high
number of competitive races in a state that is normally a bedrock of
their power. Maloney, who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee, had been tasked with defending Democrats’ control of the
House. But Maloney’s defeat, along with losses by fellow New York
Democrats, ultimately could be a reason why his party loses the chamber.
National
Democrats were forced to leap into action—investing cash, and flying in
big names—late in the midterm cycle, after polling suggested the
solidly liberal state, which contains twice as many registered Democrats
as Republicans, could become unexpectedly competitive. Ultimately, that
investment might not have proven enough. As of Wednesday afternoon
Republicans had picked up at
least two House seats in New York state, with two more still too close
to call. Democrats went into the election with a lead of only five seats
in the House. Republicans are just 13 seats away from controlling the
chamber, with 54 races too close to call.
What happened here?
Some Democratic operatives have blamed re-districting
to explain the Republicans’ success. But that doesn’t tell the full
story, observers say. “I’m not sure that there is a re-districting harm
story in New York,” says Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan
Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. “These are pretty Democratic
districts, and the Democrats just underperformed their peers
nationwide.”
Joe Biden needs to go. There shouldn't be any question about this. Exit polling showed that no one wants him to run in 2024. It's over unless he's planning on taking the party down with him.
Wednesday, November 9, 2022. Did you live through all the alarmist nonsense?
Are
you okay? Where's Joe? Where is Joe!!! Oh, he's safe. Thank
goodness. Can someone now check on Marianne Williamson? Please tell me
she didn't choke on her own ego.
Katie Halper did a solid live broadcast last night.
That said, I took a lengthy break when Marianne and unhinged crazy came on.
She's become demented. Truly.
I wish Beto had won and was governor of Texas. He didn't, Marianne, and it was his own fault.
I
offered advice during that campaign but ended up washing my hands
because no one -- well one person -- was smart enough to listen. Once
they had their campaign bus out on the road, no one wanted to turn, no
one wanted to self-correct.
By October, it
was obvious they needed to rethink the campaign ads and to respond to
what Gregg Abbott's campaign was airing -- obvious to anyone with a
brain. Instead of being dismayed by the ads, they thought the ads were
funny.
I guess they were.
If you wanted Beto to be the butt of the joke.
At
the start of the month, I wrote about it in the gina & krista
roundrobin and said ignore the chatter, the race is over and Gregg
Abbott will win. Kat wrote about, at her site, what I'd said here.
They
made fun of him in these ads. Sometimes they used his own words to
turn him into a joke. Sometimes, they just made sure to show him
frozen, arm extended out, pit stain on full display. Sometimes they
called him "beet-O" and sometimes they called him "Bet-O" and sometimes I
couldn't tell what they were calling him -- but the point being that
they were saying his name was nonsense and made up -- they especially
got that across when they used Latinas to speak on camera.
They
hit hard on crime and broadcast him making apparent anti-police remarks
-- and this was in a climate where the whole state was seeing ads about
crime over and over. Like the widow of the border patrol agent who
spoke of a female Democrats who had disparaged border patrol agents and
the widow defended her late husband on camera. Or the crying
African-American mother who spoke of how the man who killed her son
should never have been released.
Beto's
campaign didn't know what the hell they were doing. Those remarks about
the police that Beto made -- they played them word for word in the
anti-Beto commercials -- were being heard in an environment that had
heard from families and survivors in one commercial after another.
I like Beto. I know him from his time in Congress. But is he honestly that vain?
Where is his family?
I was asking that in August. Where was his family in the commercials?
They never showed up.
And
the Abbott campaign finally noted this and started, in the last two
weeks of October, putting Gregg's family front and center. "They've
just released a commercial with a niece, I think she's Hispanic!"
That's how one phone call of panic from someone with the campaign
began.
Yeah, because he's not an idiot.
Did they think Gregg Abbott got to be governor by luck? He knows politics. And Beto should have known that about his opponent.
Beto
looked like a sweaty fraud with a funny name that everyone mocked him
for who was deeply out of touch with Texas -- they played a lot of
soundbites. And deeply out of touch with the world.
That's
why you put the family in the ads. You want the viewers to see that
the candidate has connections to the world we live in.
This is the conclusion of what Kat wrote:
Beto needs to be talking about crime in
some form, C.I. pointed out, and he needs to bring his family into the
ads and talk about the future of Texas and what that means to him as the
father of three children. And she offered concrete examples including
footage of the ice storm that hit Texas awhile back and how close they
came to losing power across the state. "We deserve better."
Maybe Beto doesn't want to really be governor?
By
the time October rolled around, I was done with a campaign that didn't
listen and was constantly saying, "Hey, remember what you said last
week, maybe you were right?" Maybe? I was right but even then the
campaign didn't self-correct.
It was a lousy
campaign that wasted a lot of money. There were other races that could
have used that money, races where people wanted to fight for the
office.
Marianne's nonsense is exactly why
Beto lost. And she is the problem. And how dare she whine about being
in Texas and trying to turn out the vote for him and being appalled
because someone dared to ask her why they should vote for Beto instead
of Abbott.
Idiot, that's why you were there.
And every chance you got was not something to whine about, it was an
opportunity to communicate. Marianne's an idiot.
There
are a lot of idiots out there. They think what works national will
work in a state and that's really not true. That especially don't know
Texas. When Ann Richards was governor, a friend of Ann's put us
together because Ann had just been elected and was riding a high wave. I
was asked to talk to her about pitfalls. Specifically, if she ran for
re-election down the line, who would be up against her, blah blah blah.
It sounded like a fun game. So I went to Texas (I'd been there
before) and spent a few weeks and came up with George W. Bush.
I
didn't know it was Bully Boy Bush. I just identified several scenarios
and the one that she lost to was Bush. It was a man who had been in
the military, he had a connection to a popular Texas sports team, he was
married to teacher or a librarian (I did have the wife, in the
illustrations I drew, as blond, so I was wrong on that), he would have
daughters so they wouldn't worry he would be like Ann's previous
opponent (who made an infamous rape remark). I also identified some of
the issues that could be a problem for Ann in an effort to be
re-elected.
I was right there too.
The
advice wasn't heeded -- my presentation actually got a laugh from Ann
-- not a kind one -- when I was sketching in the man who could beat
her. There's no one like that, I was told. And that's fine and dandy
but I wasn't casting, I was saying this is the opponent who would
destroy her. He might not have been around that year, and he might
never come around. But who would destroy her chances? A person fitting
that description. Too bad for Ann, Bully Boy Bush did emerge. (Too
bad for the world, he emerged.)
She could have
beaten him but when it was time for her re-election, she was a national
figure and national people came around who just knew best. They knew
nothing. And Ann on a Harley was just flat out ridiculous. They knew
nothing and they steered her campaign into the ditch.
If
I'm asked advice about a campaign, I don't have a cookie-cutter
response because each campaign is different. There are some universal
trueisms, yes, but it is a mistake to think that something that worked
in Iowa can be transplanted to Florida. At best, adjustments will have
to be made, at worst, the whole thing will need to be scrapped.
I have no idea what state Beto pictured himself campaigning in but it wasn't the Texas of 2020.
As for Marianne's nonsense, it's the day after, most of us are still alive. Calm the f**k down.
As of late Tuesday evening Eastern Time, the Republican Party
appeared to be within reach of winning the House of Representatives in
the first nationwide election held since it supported Trump’s January 6,
2021 coup attempt.
The results in many House races remain very
close, however, and control over the Senate will likely not be known for
days. The narrowness of the margins and the length of time required to
count all votes set the stage for a protracted period of crisis, with a
potential for violence. Trump is falsely claiming that the Democratic
Party is engaged in fraud in states like Arizona, where a technical
glitch caused a delay in vote tabulation.
Though Republicans will
win seats from the Democrats, results do not indicate a substantial
increase in support for the Republicans, whose hopes for a 30+ seat
shift in the House do not seem to be materializing.
On the
contrary, the national picture that emerges from the results so far is
one of popular disinterest in what both parties have to offer.
Republicans are performing well in Ohio and Florida but poorly in the
Northeast, where they had expected to make gains.
Beyond Ohio and
Florida, Democrats are also underperforming in Wisconsin and have been
unable to deliver clear victories in Georgia and Pennsylvania, though
the Senate races there remain undecided. Democratic Campaign Committee
Chair Sean Maloney is presently losing his election for Congress in New
York’s 17th District in what would be a substantial defeat for a
Democratic leader.
The election also shows that Trump is not
having success at expanding his base of support beyond a relatively
narrow core. Many of the candidates most closely associated with Trump
appear headed for defeat, including in gubernatorial races in Arizona,
Michigan and Pennsylvania, three battleground states, though these
results could still change as more votes are counted.
The
results of a number of state ballot referendums also make clear the
election does not reflect a shift to the right in popular consciousness.
In Vermont, Kentucky and Michigan voters appear likely to enshrine the
right to abortion in the state constitution, and a similar measure will
be voted on in California. Referendums in favor of legalizing marijuana
are also passing in Maryland and Missouri, and voters in heavily
Republican South Dakota are voting by a substantial margin to expand
Medicaid for the state’s impoverished residents.
A
U.S. citizen who worked at a local English-language institute was shot
dead in Baghdad, the U.S. Embassy there announced Tuesday, in a rare
attack on a foreign visitor to the country.
Stephen
Troell lived and worked in Baghdad at the Global English Institute
together with his wife and four children, all of whom were involved in
the running of the facility.
[. . .]
Iraqi officials said Troell’s vehicle was attacked by “unknown” gunmen
as he drove through central Baghdad on Monday. The weapon that killed
him was fitted with a suppressor, they said, but they provided no
further information. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive case.
In "Stephen Troell was murdered in Baghdad,"
Trina pointed out that we named Stephen in yesterday's snapshot and
that US press outlets weren't doing that. I have no idea why they
didn't. RUDAW had already named Stephen and multiple Twitter accounts
in Iraq had named him and published his photo. I have no idea why the
US press didn't name him when it was not something hidden. Maybe it was
sloppy reporting on their part? I have no idea. Maybe they didn't
know his name was already out there and had been for a few hours.
Meanwhile,
failed and disgraced cult leader Moqtada al-Sadr has struggled in
recent months for relevancy. He wasn't able to put together a
government despite repeated attempts. He's not a kingmaker. He's not
much of anything. But he's finally found an issue he can dedicate
himself to. THE ARAB WEEKLY reports:
The leader of the Sadrist movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, has recently
kept a low profile, demonstrating that he has accepted the new political
realties in Iraq, foremost of which is the control by his rivals in
the Coordination Framework of both the government and parliament.
But the Sadrist leader has reemerged to express fears that Iraqi youth could borrow a page from Iran's anti-clerical protests.
What concerns Sadr in particular is the practice by young Iranian
teenagers of knocking off turbans of mullahs in the streets in defiance
of the ruling theocracy.
The new "street game" comes as part of ongoing popular protests over
the death of 22-year old Mahsa Amini in the hands of the morality policy
for not being "properly veiled".
Sadr did not hide his anguish over the possible spread of the
symbolic movement to Iraq where clerics, blamed for many of Iraq's ills
since 2003, could be the target of street's anger.
I guess the plight of tipping cows was already taken. But Moqtada has found his issue, has found his cause.
