The big news coming from yesterday’s primary is that Mitt Romney has officially clenched the nomination.  This is sort of a fake news story — it is what got the headlines out of the Texas slew of elections due to there not really being any real elections to talk about or discuss.

So, if we lead with that here’s what we look at.
Mitt Romney … 68.97 percent
Ron Paul …  11.94 percent

Ron Paul is a favorite son.  Maybe?  I don’t think this gets him to a delegate.  The fun and frivolity continues at Daily Paul and various blog organs, though.  See here, for instance.  There will be a way that Ron Paul will get the Presidency, oh yes.

Coming in last place is… John Davis?  With .32 percent of the vote.  Who is John Davis?  Immediately I think of the 1924 Democratic Presidential nominee.  Who had a boomlet going for that as early as 1920, apparently.  The low point in Democratic Presidential vote-getting, a man who dared say that the Klan was evil [to the chagrin of William Jennings Bryan] and ended his career as fighting on behalf of segregation in Brown v Board of Education.
This is a different John Davis.   It may be that his campaign travel journal is worth a quick gander in the way any candidate fighting it out on a vanity campaign with a Constitution in one hand and a firearm in the other might be.

The Republican Senate campaign  drags us down to Ted Cruz versus David Dewhurst.  The big question we have on such a matter, as this is the first time I’m looking at this race — “So.  Who’s the Tea Party guy?  And how far to the right is the non Tea Party guy?”  Ted Cruz is the man who is running to the right of Dewhurst, who is having to figure out how to get to the right of Cruz.  Should be an exciting run-off, I suppose.

But the runoff, which will determine the GOP nominee to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, will mainly depend on which candidate can capture voters who turned out to support one of the other seven GOP candidates on Tuesday’s ballot.
That competition centers on third place finisher Tom Leppert, the former mayor of Dallas, who received 13 percent of Tuesday’s vote. Anecdotal evidence suggests supporters of Leppert are more likely to back Dewhurst than Cruz in a runoff. But Cruz supporters believe they can mobilize and capitalize on tea party energy to achieve a win in July.

Maybe he can snake out support from all the other five candidates to match the support from Leppert?

Craig James 3.59 percent
Glenn Addison 1.68 percent
Lela Pittenger 1.28 percent
Ben Gambini .51 percent
Curt Cleaver .47 percent
Joe Agris .32 percent

Just get all these votes and keep Leppert’s down, and you may get there!  Just as we can figure out what eats at the Joe Agris supporters — little help here?
I asked why he was running. He said that voters will “trust a doctor” more than politicians, who he accused of having “constipation of thought and diarrhea of words.”

On the Democratic side, we are outside of the Appalachia streak, so what we have is …

Barack Obama 88.21 percent
John Wolfe 5.05 percent
Darcy G Richardson 4.29 percent
Bob Ely 2.43 percent

A disappointment, actually, as it suggests that John Wolfe hasn’t consolidated the anti-Obama vote as I might have hoped with his earlier performances in West Virginia and Louisiana– nearly equaled Darcy Richardson.  Maybe Richardson isn’t that bad — a political lineage off of Eugene McCarthy (he got clean for Gene) and into the much Green Party proto party “Consumer Party“.  I suspect Wolfe had to ride momentum off of West Virginia to gain the vague name recognition in order to surpass Richardson.

Bob Ely is the cranky “Letters to the Editor” opinionator man who uses the words “Common Sense” a lot and thinks it’s neat to shout “Son of bitches” at the powerful.  A closer inspection of his website reveals he is not as kooky as I’d first suspect by first glance at his website.

The Senate race clusterfuck suggests that the Democrats don’t have a chance in Hell here.  In a situation like this — a Republican state in a Presidential election year, they really would need to have a clear good front-liner “slated”:

Pete Sadler 35.12 percent
Grady Yarbrough  25.82 percent
Addie Dainell 22.9 percent
Sean Hubbard 16.14 percent

Here’s to a run off between Pete Sadler and Grady Yarbrough.  The word is that Yarbrough is that “fluke”-ish candidate nobody had ever really heard of that didn’t have any money.  See
Unlike his three competitors in the primary, Yarbrough has not reported raising or spending any money with the Federal Elections Commission. Yarbrough said he just hasn’t filed any reports yet but did spend money around the state promoting his campaign. Yarbrough said he advertised in African-American newspapers and had yard signs up in several parts of the state.

I can state categorically:  he came in second because of the much heralded Senator in Texas history, Ralph Yarbrough.

That’s the state level for you.  After that we get down to the Congressional seats.  Where a lot of things are certainly there, under the radar, worth looking at.

I guess Mother Jones provides some goods.

Excellent news here:   An Anti-Drug War progressive knocked off an eight-term incumbent: In El Paso, progressive Beto O’Rourke beat eight-term Democratic Rep. Silvestre Reyes, and he did it without running away from the issue that brought him to prominence—the War on Drugs, which he considers to be an utter failure. Washington might not be able to talk about weed without making dumb pot jokes, but in far West Texas, they may have turned a corner.

Also excellent news here:  Texas’ top birther is done: State Rep. Leo Berman (R) is famous in these parts for introducing a bill demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate and for attempting to ban Islamic Shariah law. (He also sponsored a secession rally.) But he’s a lame duck after losing to challenger Matt Schaefer. Per the Texas Tribune: “Berman, who is battling non-Hodgkins lymphoma, had said that he was retiring after the last legislative session but decided to run again after meeting Schaefer, whom he described as arrogant.

Two chips to throw down what probably over is vaguely annoying.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 9:35 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.