Around here, the talk is about Jerry Jones changing Cowboys’ coaches again and the Rangers blowing millions to upgrade the 2022 team. Once in a while, people do talk about the elections and Governor Abbott got more good news today. This is from The UT-Tyler poll and The Dallas Morning News:
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is running 11 percentage points ahead of Democrat Beto O’Rourke in this year’s race for Texas governor, according to a Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday.
Buoyed by 2-to-1 support among whites and a growing number of voters who identify as Republican, Abbott leads O’Rourke in a hypothetical matchup, 47%-36%. He even holds a narrow lead over O’Rourke among Hispanics, 40%-39%.
The poll also said that the “generic ballot” for Congress favors the GOP 54%-44% and poor President Biden is viewed unfavorably by 57% of Texans.
Maybe we understand now why President Biden won’t be campaigning for a lot of Democrats down here. Beto already said no to having Mr. Biden helping him.
Let me add a couple of thoughts.
I’m not surprised that Mr. O’Rourke is off to a slow start. This is 2022 and not 2018. Beto defined himself as a Bernie Sanders liberal in the 2020 primaries and shot himself in the foot with an AR-15.
As for the Governor, he is a competent man but does not have the charismatic qualities of former Governor Perry. He is also under attack from the right for not doing more on the border. Honestly, what else is he supposed to do? The good news for the Governor is that he will survive the primary challenges and start spending all that money painting O’Rourke as a liberal.
So far so good, if you like the Governor as I do. The best part of this poll is how the Governor is tied with Hispanics. I guess that Democrats are finally starting to realize that there is more to being a Hispanic than talking about immigration reform or DACA.
Let me conclude with a crazy thought. I would not be surprised if Mr. O’Rourke pulls out of this race before the primary. He can’t afford a double-digit loss in November and he knows it.
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On Sunday, I always say hello at church to a couple of old-time Brooklyn Dodgers fans. Like many others, they moved to Texas years ago but cannot stop talking about their old team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. They know that I was born in Cuba and can't help to remind me of that Cuban who made one of the greatest postseason catches in baseball history.
Edmundo (Isasi) Amoros was born in La Habana on this day in 1930. He died in Miami in 1992.
Sandy Amoros, as he was known in the majors, broke with the Dodgers in 1952. He was a part-time outfielder, a platoon hitter facing primarily right-handed pitchers. Amoros was also a late-inning defensive replacement.
Amoros also played in the Cuban winter league. I remember my father speaking about him.
His biggest moment was Game 7 in the 1955 World Series. Amoros made a running catch and then threw back to shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who then doubled off a Yankee runner at first base. It killed the rally and preserved the eventual 2-0 shutout and the only Brooklyn Dodgers World Series victory.
It turned the Cuban outfielder into one of the biggest heroes in Brooklyn baseball history.
This is how they recall the play at The Society of Baseball Research:
On October 4, 1955, outfielder Edmundo Amorós helped "Next Year" arrive at last for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His racing catch off Yogi Berra near the left-field line at Yankee Stadium saved the Bums' 2-0 lead in Game Seven of the World Series. Johnny Podres held on for the remaining three innings to bring Brooklyn its only title. The grab by Amorós still stands as one of the greatest in Series history, and it was the defining moment of the Cuban's career.
Amoros played seven years and retired with a .255 career batting and did hit 16 HR in 114 games in 1956. Nevertheless, he was King Kong one afternoon in Yankee Stadium, and the Dodgers finally won the World Series.
Hey, Sandy — they don't stop talking about you whenever old Dodgers fans recall their legendary history.
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In a few weeks, President Biden will present a candidate for the Supreme Court. All we know is that it will be a black woman. Yes, on the 59th anniversary of the “I have a dream” speech, we will select a person based on her skin color.
So what does the GOP do?
Some are calling for the GOP to hold up the appointment, or using some Senate rules to keep the nomination from going to a floor debate. Others are calling for a battle over her opinions, legal or otherwise. Others, like Professor Jonathan Turley, are questioning the racial component of the nomination given cases that the Court may be looking at soon:
Biden's controversial use of racial and gender criteria will only grow in the coming months as the Supreme Court considers two new cases involving racial preferences in college admissions. Those cases may now be heard before a Court with one member who was expressly selected initially on the basis of not of a racial preference but a racial exclusionary rule.
What does the GOP do? Confirm the lady and move on. Don't let the Democrats use the nomination to play the race card, and you know that's their plan. What else do they know what to do?
Confirm the lady. She will not change the ideological balance on the court. She will join Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan in writing minority opinions but have no consequence on the major cases, such as abortion or racial preferences in schools.
The GOP should not allow the Biden administration to change the subject. Most Americans are worried about inflation, the fights over mandates and the general economy. Arguing over a woman that will not change the court is not worth it.
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The Biden administration's open border policy is alive and well. The numbers are amazing for people who have followed this over the years. I have never seen anything like this. This is from the New York Post:
Biden breaks records every month, with apprehensions on track to reach a million in his first full year. You can see why they keep coming: The Border Patrol estimates that hundreds of thousands more pass through without interception, while the administration releases most of those it does catch, even quietly resettling migrants all across the country.
The only White House strategy here, in other words, is to try keeping the crisis out of the headlines while sending as few illegal crossers as possible home.
This is obscene and it has nothing to do with immigration reform, DACA or asylum. We have legal ways to come to the U.S. and this is not how you legally cross the border. How do I know? I came to the U.S. with my parents and we had to follow a process. Our family left Cuba and then had to wait, at our expense, in Jamaica as our "papers" were being processed.
The Biden administration has benefited from national media coverage that does not tell Americans what's going on or keeps track of these people as they fly to their destination. Down in South Texas, the Biden administration has not been so lucky, as we see in the growing dissatisfaction with the border crisis.
To make matters worse, these people are coming into the country without vaccine requirements or isolation periods. How many of these people have COVID and have infected others? No one knows.
Will President Biden be impeached over this? I don't know, but his administration is not enforcing the law to the loss of his fellow citizens.
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The Democrats are just getting sillier by the minute. Where are the serious people in the party? I can't see too many of them.
The latest is talking about "threats to democracy" and Miami talk radio. This is from Alex Perez:
The painful reality for the Latinx set is that Hispanics are, as Ruy Teixeira recently wrote, “a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working-class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns.” Which means they have more in common with working-class Americans of all races than they do with Democratic Party elites. Anti-Americanism, violent riots, and pathological obsessions with racial and gender categorization cut no ice with them.
Well written, Alex.
The left is attacking Miami talk radio for having strong opinions against the leftist rhetoric. This is true and anyone who grew up in a Cuban home, as I did, knows that our parents' generation hated communism and told us how rotten it was every time we got together for dinner. They lived it. They remember how socialism destroyed their island and its way of life. They lived through the rewriting of history in government schools.
Miami talk radio is not a threat to democracy even if the screaming and intensity can burn your car speaker. Miami talk radio is pro-democracy because everyone from the grandparents still around to the younger generation who have never visited Cuba, knows how the left will eventually destroy dissent by calling every form of it a “threat to democracy.”
They call him Representative Cuellar in South Texas and a Democrat on the border who makes a lot of sense. He speaks his mind and has been critical of the Biden approach, i.e. open border. Nevertheless, he may be in trouble in a year that Democrats already have a lot of problems. This is from The Texas Tribune:
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar may be the most powerful Texas Democrat whom most Texans have never heard of. But with early voting to begin in a matter of weeks, he is in a world of political trouble.
On Wednesday, the FBI raided the nine-term congressman’s home in Laredo. For now, government officials are keeping a tight lid on what spurred their actions. But it could not come at a worse time for Cuellar, who is in the fight of his political life ahead of the Democratic primary on March 1.
We will wait for the FBI to finish whatever they’ve started. In the meantime, the politics of the district may be in play.
In 2020, Mr. Cuellar won easily with 58% of the vote. He will be running for reelection in a slightly different district with a partisan + 7 Democrat edge. He won by almost 20 in 2020 but will have to fight a bit harder in 2022 because of redistricting.
The FBI story won’t help Mr. Cuellar especially if something embarrassing comes out. According to news reports, this is a federal investigation about Azerbaijan and a group of U.S. businessmen who have ties to that country. In the meantime, this is bad news for the Democrats because they thought that this was a safe seat that could handle the expected red wave.
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Our insane world has hit woke bottom. This is from Fox News:
Penn swimmer Lia Thomas came away with wins in the 100 meter and 200-meter freestyle races against Harvard on Saturday.
The victories came days after the NCAA updated its policy for transgender participation and how it will be determined on a sport-by-sport basis.
What did Thomas do? He, and he is a he, shattered women's records. Who knows what women were denied scholarships because of this?
The answer is for men to compete with men and women with women. It's not discrimination. It's common sense.
Let's give a cheer for Texas for understanding that biology makes boys and girls different. A few months ago, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 25:
Texas’ transgender student athletes will be restricted from playing on K-12 school sports teams that align with their gender identity under a bill Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Monday.
House Bill 25, authored by state Rep. Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, will require student athletes who compete in interscholastic competition to play on sports teams that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate at or near their time of birth. It is set to go into effect Jan. 18.
The legislation goes further than current rules from the University Interscholastic League, which governs school sports in Texas. Under current UIL rules, a student’s gender is determined by their birth certificate. But UIL also accepts legally modified birth certificates in which someone may have had their sex changed to align with their gender identity.
The Texas approach makes sense. The NCAA is woke and weak. The NCAA refuses to go the distance and make a statement to protect young women. Again, this is not about discrimination. It's about common sense -- something lacking on the woke side of the world.
We are not talking about T-ball. This is competitive sports where size and speed matter. As the uncle of five nieces who participated in high school sports, I think that everyone at the NCAA leadership should resign.
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