PN-G bamatex

By the end of tonight, the Republican party will hold a 53-seat majority in the Senate. If Mary Landrieu falls in the Louisiana runoff as I expect she will, that majority will increase to 54 seats. That's a ten seat swing, and two more seats than even the most favorable polls gave the Republicans in this mid-term election.   On the state level, I couldn't be happier to see the twenty point clobbering that Greg Abbott gave Wendy Davis, and I hope that sends a clear signal to all of the rich Democrat PACs from other parts of the country that have been pouring money into our state.   It was a really good night.

  [Hidden Content]   Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

LSU is, hands down, the most talented two-loss team in the country.   A buddy of mine kept saying there was no way they'd crack the top 20 after beating Ole Miss, and I told him #17 over and over again. Should have made a bet on it.

Dude, if you're wrapped up in college football enough that you're keeping track of every little incident where a fan of your team's rival does something wrong, and you're ready to pull that list out any time a fan of said rival makes a comment about a general perception that has nothing to do with you or your team, you might need to lay off the football and reassess your priorities for a little while.

  I didn't mock them. I just stated a perception of LSU fans shared by many fans in the SEC, including those in your own fanbase. After all, it was an Auburn fan who coined the term, "corndog."   That's not exactly running around with a rap sheet for individual members of a fanbase like you are.

  A long list that only indicates crazy people will do crazy things. That's life. I could probably spend ten minutes using Google to find stupid things done by Auburn fans, but I'm not going to. Why? Because I'm not going to let a rivalry turn into an obsession.

  This post is funny, too, because it reveals the obvious little-sister complex you must have to keep a record of all of the events you just outlined on your team's rival school.

  It's not uncommon to hear people say that LSU is the Texas Tech of the SEC, and it wouldn't surprise me if there's a similar saying at Big XII schools.

  You know that abrasive, backwards cousin every family has that lives out in the boondocks and is a pain to deal with for the rest of the family at weddings, funerals and Thanksgiving?   That's kind of how LSU is for the rest of the SEC.

[Hidden Content]

  Any Democrat gubernatorial candidate would have had to tow the party line on the abortion bill, yes. But not every candidate would have had their entire political career explicitly tied to it.   Davis is not politically stupid. If the governorship was really what she wanted, there are other things she could have done to galvanize the Democrat base in Texas without antagonizing the average Texas voter she would need to win over. She wanted attention for no other reason than to have attention, because she knew she wasn't going to win her Senate seat again. The gubernatorial aspirations had to have come after the filibuster - it doesn't make good political sense otherwise - and I suspect they arose for the same reason the filibuster did: attention, plain and simple.   I guarantee you she's angling for something else here. She had to have known the whole time she couldn't have won the governorship. She wants some kind of consolation prize.

  Exactly how smart it was is up for debate.   The polls I saw at that time said that the specific bill Wendy Davis filibustered had a 60% approval rating among Texas voters. Polls I've seen since then say 59% of Texas voters are some form of pro-life.   If Davis's goal in that filibuster was to announce her campaign for governor, she couldn't have picked a worse bill to filibuster. You can't run an effective campaign for governor when your lone claim to fame is a filibuster of a bill 60% of the people in your state agreed with. If she had filibustered a bill on a separate issue where there's less agreement with the Republicans among Texas voters - a bill cutting funding for public education, for instance - she could have caught similar attention at least within the state, and she would have been in a far better position to run her campaign for governor.   If, on the other hand, the goal here isn't the governorship like I suspect, then Davis's ploy worked perfectly. Davis's term in the Senate was due to be up this year. In both of her elections to the Senate prior to this cycle, Davis barely won her district - she won 49.9% of the vote during a race in which there were three candidates running in her district in 2008, and she won just 51.1% of the vote in 2012. By virtue of her drawing the dreaded two-year Texas Senate term out of a hat, she would have been up for reelection to the Senate this year.   Any political strategist worth his salt knows that mid-term election cycles, which happen to coincide with gubernatorial election cycles in the State of Texas, are typically bad years for Democrats. The core Democrat constituencies don't turn out to vote in the same numbers for mid-terms like they do presidential elections. Davis, having barely won her district in presidential election years with record high turnout for the Democrat voting base, had to have known that it wasn't in the cards for her to win her Senate seat again this year. I think she decided to go out with a bang, and that was the impetus behind her infamous filibuster over the abortion bill. I think that filibuster caught her more attention than she expected, and she saw an opportunity to win the Democrat nomination for Texas Governor, which would allow her to go out with an even bigger bang than she had previously expected (she knows, and has known the entire race, that she doesn't have a shot of winning without a serious mistake from Abbott, which he has yet to give her). I think the endgame for Davis has never been the governorship, I think it's a pricey book deal and a possible federal appointment. And right now, she's on track to get exactly that.

Regardless of the underlying impetus, this, in conjunction with A&M's poor season and last week's loss in particular, will do a lot for recruiting at Texas.

Perhaps it's because I now spend nine months a year outside of Texas, but I have yet to see Abbott's campaign do anything that approaches the mudslinging Davis's campaign has engaged in. Maybe some PACs have, but keep in mind that everything I've listed here came directly from Davis's campaign, not from an associated PAC.

[Hidden Content]   Forgive the use of an overtly partisan source for this information. I think it's perfectly acceptable given that the tweets and quotes cited in the article come directly from Wendy Davis's campaign, itself.   This is getting very old very quickly. I'll give Davis credit for sticking to the facts in the debates, even though it was obvious Abbott didn't care much about the debates because of their relative insignificance in the greater scope of an election he's been winning by double digits the entire time it's been underway. But all these attacks regarding Abbott's paraplegia, and now an accusation that he may oppose interracial marriage when he's married to an Hispanic?   Like I said earlier, there are very few cases where I enjoy watching a Democrat lose more than I enjoy watching a Republican win. This is one of those cases. This woman needs to be booted out of Texas politics.

  Don't try. Just don't try. Any other liberal poster on this site will have a real discussion, but with her, it's just not worth it.

  Don't speak too soon.  ;)  :P

I don't see how it can. Honestly, I don't see how it's necessary for the case to proceed. This is a lawsuit over whether a petition to put a measure on the ballot was improperly dismissed on the grounds that it didn't contain enough signatures. The content of a series of sermons has no bearing on whether that's the case. If this was a lawsuit over the portion of the tax code dealing with religious entities and their prohibitions on political speech from the pulpit, I could see the relevance. Absent that, this is a gross misuse of the city attorney's powers.   Harris County, the most populous county in the state of Texas, only went for Obama in 2012 by about a thousand votes. When I consider that with everything that Annise Parker and the Houston city council have done in mind, I'm forced to wonder if Houston's city elections are really reflecting the will of the people.

[Hidden Content]   Well that's a pretty bold step.

[Hidden Content]

I normally enjoy watching Republicans win more than I do watching Democrats lose. This is one of the few elections where the opposite is true (knock on wood).

  Why was this information withheld? Why is it coming out just now?   The Bush administration could have saved itself countless troubles, and could have probably saved the Republican party from severe beatings at the polls in 2006 and again in 2008, had this information been made public. The fact that it wasn't made public, in spite of the obvious political damage its being withheld would do, leads me to one of two conclusions: either the information was withheld for strategic reasons of immense importance, or it was withheld for ulterior motives.   I have trouble believing it would be withheld because of ulterior motives, in part because no possible ulterior motives come to mind, and in part because ulterior motives are normally political in nature, and the politically savvy thing to do, obviously, would have been to release the information. That means that this information had to have been withheld for strategic reasons.   If it was withheld for strategic reasons, what are those strategic reasons, and why have they suddenly been disregarded?   I have a gut feeling this has something to do with Russia.

Ole Miss's defense is a heck of a lot better than A&M's, and the offenses are comparable when Wallace is on his game. I don't see how A&M can be favored to win, even at home. If A&M's defense had shaped up like I hoped it would, I could see it, but not now. Ole Miss by at least two possessions.

I don't know how many times I have to say this.   LSU is a freight train. They're hard to get moving, but once they do, they're almost impossible to stop. For Les Miles, it's all about momentum. They'll waste two and a half quarters doing nothing offensively, and then all of the sudden they get one big play and go on a scoring spree nobody can put an end to. Other teams have games like this every now and then, but for LSU, it's a recurring theme.   I could pick out half a dozen examples of this. Not the least of which is their game versus Wisconsin earlier this year, when LSU went from being down 24-7 to winning the game 28-24 in a matter of minutes. Two of the best examples come from their games against Tennessee and Georgia in 2011. In fact, against Georgia, LSU went in at halftime down 10-7, and became the first team in the history of the SEC to not make a single first down in the first half of a game. Then Tyrann Mathieu comes out and made a big play (a kickoff return for a touchdown, if I recall correctly) to start the second half, and LSU never looked back. They won that game, 42-10. Against Tennessee, LSU spent a quarter and a half struggling to get their first touchdown and tie Tennessee. Then they went on a roll and won, 38-7. The same thing almost happened last week between LSU and Miss State; LSU scored 19 points in the fourth quarter to almost come back from a 24 point deficit. The freight train got moving, but just ran out of time.   If you want to beat LSU, you have to make sure they never get that spark that gets their fire going. Saban proved that in the 2011 national championship. Alabama never let Mathieu get a big play, and sure enough, Alabama pitched a shutout on the Bayou Bengals in what might as well have been their own stadium. The gameplan against LSU has been the same ever since, and Alabama has yet to lose to them again. What happened in Auburn tonight is virtually the same thing.

All those years of "thank God for Mississippi" have backfired on the rest of the South in the last two weeks.