You've all heard about how 76-year-old Thad Cochran was able to win his Republican Party Senate primary Tuesday night against Tea Partier Chris McDaniel by getting the help from Democrats who were allowed to vote in the open primary.Whether those Democrats (many of them black) were the ultimate difference is something that political scientists can break down in the next few days, but in any case, right-wing commentators aren't coping with it very well.
Remember when Rush Limbaugh attempted to buy the St. Louis Rams a few years ago, but faced severe pushback in part because a lot of people in the league weren't fond of comments he'd made about blacks? Well, yesterday El Rushbo called black Mississippi voters for Cochran "Uncle Toms."
"Uncle Toms for Thad? Because I thought that was the worst thing you could do as an African-American was vote for a Republican, but somehow they were made to believe, voting for Old Thad, would be fine and dandy. And why? Because they were told that Thad had done a lot for black people. Must be the first time they’ve been told that," Limbaugh remarked.
"Establishment Republicans realized they couldn’t win without cheating basically, without gaming the system. I think a lot of laws have been broken here,” Sean Hannity said on the radio. “It is so sleazy, so despicable, it is frankly so Democratic in nature, it’s what I’d expect the Democrats to use; they used every despicable tactic they possibly could because they didn’t want to lose.”
Yesterday morning on 970-WFLA you could hear Glenn Beck complain that he was "sick to his stomach."
'I thought I was living in the country where liberty had a chance, where fair play had a chance, where we weren’t talking about a GOP — a Grand Old Party, emphasis on old, outdated, dusty, irrelevant and never ever going to see a dime from people like me ever again. I really thought that we had a chance of some common sense,” Beck said on his show. “Now, I have a question for every black Democrat in Mississippi: What the hell has this 90-year-old fart — a white Republican, the same white Republican that for years the Democrats had been telling you are nothing but old racists — you tell me exactly what Thad Cochran did for you.”
Actually, he's got a damn good point there. But since the Democrat in the Senate race who will face Cochran in November isn't considered to have much of a chance in this very conservative state, undoubtedly Cochran was a better candidate than McDaniel. Another case of voting for the lesser of two evils, sadly…
Greenlight Pinellas continues to be one of the hottest political stories of the year in the Tampa Bay area. On Tuesday night Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn traversed the Howard Frankland to join three Pinellas County mayors to talk up the transit tax initiative. And then yesterday morning, PSTA CEO Brad Miller pooh-poohed a report by WTSP-10 News reporter Mike Deeson from Monday night that questioned the Pinellas County transit agency's spending Homeland Security funding on ads that mention the Greenlight initiative. But reached in San Francisco where he was attending (and presenting) at an investigative reporters conference, Deeson didn't bow down.
Although several members of the St. Pete City Council have expressed discomfort with not having more say on who Mayor Rick Kriseman will choose as the city's next police chief, the mayor says he doesn't have that much sympathy for their complaints. Kriseman told CL on Tuesday night that he expects to choose amongst the four candidates once he returns from a 4th of July holiday in two weeks' time.
And the ACLU and several other organizations have contacted Attorney General Eric Holder, asking him to put his Department of Justice on the case of what happened to a mentally ill prisoner in the state's custody last year, as well as how the state is treating all such mentally ill prisoners.