Wednesday, November 09, 2022

Iraq snapshot

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 **last** 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 2022.


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.

Let's close with BROS.




Forgot to note THIRD yesterday:




The following sites updated:






at