Ruben Grilling

Ladies and gentlemen, meet a future member of the Failed Democratic Senate Candidates Club!

Yes, in the tradition of Harvey Gantt, Ron Klink, Harold Ford, Jr., Kendrick Meek, Beto O'Rourke, Cal Cunningham, Theresa Greenfield, Sarah Gideon, Val Demings and Tim Ryan, I present Ruben Gallego, a declared Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona in 2024!

Gallego plans to run against incumbent Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, a former Democrat who is now an independent and his best known for stalling President Biden's agenda, which Gallego has ardently supported.

So why do I think the five-term U.S House member, who has a liberal record on voting rights, abortion rights, and economic issues and is considered a leading House progressive, is going to lose his Senate bid next year?  Mainly because he's a leading House progressive in a center-right state.  But there's another reason.  Senator Sinema isn't going to go down without a fight.  She will inevitably get enough signatures to run for re-election as an independent, and many moderate Democrats are likely to support her.  The split in the Democratic vote is only going to make it so much easier for the Republican Senate nominee to win Sinema's seat in 2024.  

And unlike Democrats, who blacklist failed Senate candidates to keep them from running a second time, Republicans happily give failed Senate candidates another chance for a seat . . . and they also let failed candidates for other offices run for Senate as well.  This means that the next U.S. Senator from Arizona will likely be either election denier Blake Masters or election denier Kari Lake. 

Meanwhile, expect Gallego, who appeared on Lawrence O'Donnell's show this past Monday to talk about his candidacy, to be a regular guest of Lawrence O'Donnell just as Janis Joplin was a regular guest on Dick Cavett's talk show . . . until Wednesday, November 6, 2024, when O'Donnell will suddenly have trouble remembering Gallego's name.

Most people will have already forgotten it.

What's The Matter With Arizona?

Just when we thought we could rest easy again, because the 2022 midterm elections were finally over after the Georgia runoff, U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has decided to leave the Democratic Party and become an independent.  Her change of affiliation is only the latest in a series of political surprises since Trump instigated a band of rioters against the U.S. Capitol.

Sinema say that she has never felt comfortable in any party, having found no political organization that can satisfy her.  As an independent, Sinema claims to be more in sync with her constituents, as Arizona voters tend identify themselves as independents more than as Democrats or as Republicans.  But while Sinema's change of political affiliation may help her with voters back home, it also hurts the Democratic Party.  Not because she now denies them a clear majority and so renders them unable to issues subpoenas and confirm judges - she's not caucusing with Republicans - but because she's an unreliable legislator who does not stand for anything and can buck the Democrats more freely now.  She votes on legislation not out of conviction but on caprice.  Compare that to Bernie Sanders, another independent who has a consistently liberal voting record and has run for President twice as a Democrat.  True, she's voted with President Bien 93 percent of the time, but it;'s the other seven percent of the time where she causes a lot of trouble.  

It also confounds Democratic efforts to get rid of her in 2024.  Sinema was vulnerable in the 2024 Democratic Senate primary in Arizona, with more liberal Arizona Democrats poised to challenge her.  Now that she's an independent the Democrats have to support her in 2024 or run the risk of nominating a candidate who could split the Democratic vote with Sinema and help the Republican nominee win with a plurality.  And that nominee could be one of the MAGA chuckleheads who ran for statewide office in 2022.

Speaking of which, Kari Lake is suing to get the results of the gubernatorial vote in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and is home to the majority of Arizona's residents, overthrown so that she can become governor instead of Democrat Katie Hobbs.  Lake insists that the vote count in Maricopa County is fraudulent despite no evidence whatsoever of the vote being rigged. Since she's a fake journalist, she's faking an exclusive story based on her investigative non-reporting for MAGA media.

But such fakery is nothing new for Kari Lake, since she obviously enjoys paling around with fake president Donald Trump and fake sports commissioner Linda McMahon.

Pivot Pool

It's the new game being played by Washington Democrats - a game more consequential than Russian roulette. 

President Biden's - and the Democrats' - fortunes in November and beyond hinge on where the pivot cue is going to aim next.  And the cue ball is out of control once the cue goes off.  

Things look pretty good or the party and the President right now.  The bill designed to fund medical care for service personnel in the Iraq War made sick with cancer by burn pits in the front lines just passed the Senate, and the CIA just took out Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's leader and Osama bin Laden's one-time second-in-command, in Kabul - and I don't mean to dinner.  And while all this happens, gasoline prices are slowly inching down.

But right now, things could go either way.  All signs point to a recession, though we're not quite in one just yet.  U.S. Senator Krysten Simena of Arizona still isn't on board with the bill designed to lower prescription drug prices, reduce climate change, and cut inflation - once again reminding Democrats of how they cold have avoided this by winning at least one or two of the three Senate seats Republicans held in Iowa, Maine and North Carolina in 2020.   New York State has declared a state of emergency over monkeypox - 95 percent of the state's cases are in New York City - when the nation still hasn't licked COVID yet.  And, President Biden now has symptoms from his COVID rebound.  (He didn't rebound, his COVID infection did.)  And if the worst happens, we could see . . . President Kamala Harris?

That'll be a boon for Donald Trump's comeback.

The bottom line is, everything could keep going well for the Democrats and at least minimize midterm election losses or everything could unravel again and help election deniers sweep everything in November. 😱

Vote Out

President Biden and the Democrats are likely to face a final defeat of the voting-rights legislation in the Senate tomorrow, and all indications are that Biden's incendiary speech in Atlanta about the need to pass the legislation satisfied few people - and those few are in no position to do anything about it.

The speech was primarily aimed at Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to get them to change their minds about offering a carve-out for the filibuster to allow these bills to pass, or at least reform the filibuster to force senators who use the practice to talk for hours rather than just put a block on it.  They're not budging.  Biden couldn't even satisfy voting rights activists with his speech because he didn't have a plan to back up his efforts to get the legislation passed - he was winging it, improvising as he went along.  All Biden did was offend the two senators in question for suggestion comparison  between them and Jefferson Davis or George Wallace, and his efforts to change their minds in private conversations yielded nothing.

So what's left?  Just what Biden's efforts yielded.  Nothing.  Democrats will try to push the legislation and get nowhere due to Republican opposition, and when they try to make an issue out of voting rights in the midterm election campaigns, they'll realize too late that inflation and possibly the pandemic will continue to be he dominating issues of 2022 - and the country can't seem to get beyond either.  Look for the Republicans to take over both houses of Congress in the midterms and see them investigate Biden all the way through 2023 and 2024 while voting rights are chipped away even more in the states - and by the way, the voting-rights legislation the Democrats have offered does little if anything to regulate the counting of the votes, and the Republicans will likely use laws allowing them to nullify results in different states  to win back the White House . . . possibly with Trump at the head of the ticket. 

And then 45 will become 47 when he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025, which will be the third Monday in January that year.  That is, Martin Luther King Day.

Oh, the irony!

Progressives will not give President Biden any credit for trying as hard as he could to get voting-rights legislation passed.  Because progressives pretty much follow Yoda's maxim: Do or don't do.  There is no "try."

Hard To Believe

Some things are hard to believe, aren't they?

Hard to believe that Trump would arrive at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I separately and also deliberately apart from virtually every other world leader, right?  No, the thing that's hard to believe is that he made it at all.  He wouldn't honor American war dead at a cemetery outside Paris because it was raining and he didn't want to muss up his hair.  He skipped a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery back home for the same reason.  What you expect from someone whose biggest obsession is himself?

Hard to believe that Trump razzed French president Emmanuel Macron for suggesting a pan-European defense force and proclaimed that American military superiority saved the French in both world wars? No, I believe it, because Republicans like Trump are renowned for always taking the opportunity to dismiss the French, especially for their bad luck in military engagements.  But then Republicans never appreciated that the French are better at making love than making war.

Hard to believe that Democrat Kyrsten Sinema edged out Republican Martha McSally in the U.S. Senate election in Arizona, to become Arizona's first female senator and become the first Democrat elected to the Senate from the Grand Canyon State in three decades?  No, because McSally tried to make immigration an issue in a state with a growing Hispanic population and left a bitter taste in people's mouths.  However, award McSally points for her gracious concession video, which also included her dog. 

Hard to believe that they're still counting votes in the gubernatorial and senatorial elections in Florida?  Really?  Are you kidding?

Hard to believe that a Mississippi Republican senator said something racist referring to lynching in this day and age?  See above. 

Hard to believe that Trump would get rid of Kirstjen Nielsen at the Department of Homeland Security at a time when he has 15,000 soldiers at the border defending America from . . . what?  A thousand women and children?  No, not really, because Trump doesn't think through things when he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Hard to believe that Trump would blame California for its forest fires because of bad forest management even though the latest fires are brush fires and federal forest management is a federal responsibility?  No, because Trump hates Californians for not voting for him in 2016.   Hey, he's petty. 

Hard to believe it's going to snow in the Northeast tomorrow when it's only November?  No, because that's the result of what's fueling the California wildfires - climate change.