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Troubles in CD 2 for the GOP? Complaints about the “Gang of 8,” the RPNM’s Controlling Clique. The Gang of 8 Brought Down the New Mexico Republican Party. And Now, the Gang’s Favorite—Yvette Herrell—Attacks Claire Chase over Trump. But do these kinds of attacks make sense? (Part 1 of 2 Articles on CD 2)

11/26/2019

In 2018, Yvette Herrell was unable to hold the congressional seat vacated by Steve Pearce. Okay, so sometimes campaigns don't go well. So back to the drawing board.

But our question is this: Is the recipe for 2020  to attack and vilify all Republicans who supported someone other than Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries? (Even if that group includes Herrell?) Does this make sense on any level?

How is this a strategy for success against Xochitl Torres Small? Who came up with this plan? Is it really smart? Or is it just yet another prescription for divisiveness, defeat, and disaster conjured up by the same gang of disgruntled haters who brought us 2016 and 2018?

The Gang of 8

We have reported extensively on the ongoing disaster brought on by the Gang of 8* that seized control of the Republican Party of New Mexico following the 2014 election. That Gang was jealous of the near-miraculous accomplishments of then-Governor Martinez. Martinez had just finished raising some $3 million which she and her team used to finance a brilliant strategic effort that resulted in the Republicans capturing the State House of Representatives for the first time in 60 years.

The Gang couldn’t stand it, with their hatred for her overriding the best interests of the state—and of New Mexico.

So they took control, and decided to pursue a collection of personal agendas which has resulted in systematically and relentlessly driving the party into near-complete ineffectual irrelevance.

Their “efforts” and “management” resulted in immediately losing back the House to the Democrats. Then just two years after that, their ineptitude reached world-record levels of incompetence, culminating last November in the greatest electoral disaster the New Mexico GOP has ever seen.

YET, THE GANG GOES ON: ONCE AGAIN PUSHING YVETTE HERRELL

That Gang, however, along with their allies, specifically in Alamogordo, are akin to the energizer Bunny of destructiveness. They appear to be continuously and fanatically devoted to destroying as many other Republicans as they possibly can influence or reach. The “reverse Midas Touch” has perhaps never been more starkly identified.

In 2018, the Gang pulled out all the stops for State Representative Yvette Herrell, a Pearce acolyte, to succeed Pearce in CD2. This open interference badly split Lea County Republicans by turning off and permanently alienating several thousand GOP voters who favored former Hobbs Mayor Monty Newman. 

The Gangs’ meddling in Lea County were doubly inept in that 1) Lea County is the state’s strongest GOP county, and 2) the whole effort backfired as Herrell steadfastly refused to debate Democrat nominee Xochitl Torres Small, something Newman would not have been afraid to do. The Herrell team ran a bizarrely disorganized campaign and Herrell lost by a sizeable margin.

Now, the Gang has Herrell back in the Republican primary race for a second go. This time she’s apologizing for her campaign blunders in 2018, and pledging to debate and to do “all the things she failed to do in the last campaign.”

ATTACKS on CLAIRE CHASE

Rather than run a positive campaign to inspire and motivate the GOP base (complete with the appropriate mea culpas about the blowing the 2018 general election), the 2020 Herrell team has decided to try to destroy the nascent campaign of her only serious primary opponent, Roswell Republican Claire Chase.

They have hit upon the tactic of trying to use Chase’s opposition to Trump in 2015 and 2016. Herrell, for her part, is now claiming (in Orwellian-styled lingo) to have “always been for Trump,” without a single bit of support for that claim. The evidence suggests she was actually for Ted Cruz—and others—before she found it useful to claim she had “always” been for Trump.

Clearly, neither Herrell nor Chase was truly a Trump enthusiast. So what?

Are the 2015/2016 “Trump Questions” Really Fair? Or Relevant?

Or is it more relevant to be for Trump Now?

Okay, so Chase opposed Trump in the primaries four years ago, and didn’t vote for him in the primaries. So what?

That actually lines her up with the vast majority of all Republicans. When all the votes in all 50 states’ Republican primaries were counted, Trump had 14,105,993 votes. But 17,167,848 Republicans had voted AGAINST him. (Likely including both Herrell and Chase.)

That’s right: Even after all the other candidates had dropped out, and Trump was handed the final dozen or so primaries without opposition, when all the votes were counted Trump was still opposed by a landslide majority of Republicans!

And that was after all the other Republicans had dropped out. He had started out with only 24% and 35% in New Hampshire, and only 34% on Super Tuesday. Just before his last opponent dropped out, he was being opposed by some 60% of GOP voters!

So what if you are a Republican who didn’t make Trump your First Choice?

The point we are making is that it is not an unpardonable sin for Republicans not to have not supported Trump three years ago—so long as they didn’t vote for Clinton. (Otherwise, Trump would have left 17 million votes on the table, and would have lost in a landslide.)

So does Herrell’s Gang bringing all this up, and rehashing it, matter?

Does that make the 55.2% of Republicans who opposed Trump’s nomination “bad people”? Is that relevant 3½ years later? Or is the fact that 88% of Republicans now support Trump a more relevant data point?

Why is this Gang, this one group of people—who by the way were also among the 2016 Republican majority who wanted someone other than Trump—trying to get a little bit of hate going?

Do they foment divisiveness just for the sake of it? Did they not learn anything from their loss of the House in 2016? Or their historically catastrophic loss of almost everything else in 2018? Apparently not.

Herrell, presumably with the encouragement and the approval of The Gang, has now even started a separate stand-alone website whose sole purpose is to hate on Claire Chase.  Southern New Mexico Republicans can be forgiven if they ask: “That’s your campaign? That’s your rationale for being the choice to take on Xochitl?”


* The eight include the names, Harvey Yates, Ryan Cangiolosi, Andrea Goff, John Billingsley, Mark Murphy, Anissa Galassini Ford Tinnin, Rocky Galassini, and Stevan Pearce.


Email us with your feedback, comments, questions, and ideas.

Intelligent Political Discourse—for the Thoughtful New Mexican

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National Issues

National Issues

Democrats

2016 Presidential Campaign - Democrats

Republicans

2016 Presidential Campaign - Republicans

Jeb Bush gets religion.

"They said he got religion at the end, and I'm glad that he did."  — Tom T. Hall. The Year Clayton Delaney died.

Well, it's official.  Jeb Bush has changed quite of few of his positions on illegal immigration.  The single most significant is that he no longer endorses the "path to citizenship" for those who came here illegally. 

This is, after all, the key portion of any proposal aimed at "reforming" our existing illegal immigration situation.

No sensible citizen can see any point in trying to deport between 12 and 16 million people currently living in America illegally.  And no candidate for any office that we know of supports that.  What the average American wants is for the country to "get a handle on it."  They want it stopped, our borders secured and future illegal immigration prevented.  It is a national security issue.

The Path to Legal Status

The only way to accomplish the above goals, is to identify current illegal immigrants, get them accounted for, have them documented, and placed on a path to legal status.  Neither they nor their children or spouses should live in a state of fear or anxiety.

But a path to "citizenship" is not the right course.  It is not morally or legally correct.  A merciful and compassionate nation can provide the safeguards of legal status without sending the message to the rest of the world that all you have to do is cross our border and you will eventually get to become a citizen, thus circumventing the legal framework scores of millions of Americans have followed, honored and respected.

If someone who is granted legal status eventually wants to become a citizen, that person should have to return to his or her country of origin and wait in line like 20 million people around the world are doing at any given time.  Failing that, America will forever send the signal that anyone in the world can "jump the line," and that there is no reason at all to obey our immigration and naturalization laws.

We Like Jeb Bush

We are glad Jeb Bush has learned this lesson.  He is a fine speaker, and can eloquently explain his positions on complex issue.  If he were not named "Bush" he would be an actual top tier candidate—in all that that title would entail, including likelihood of acceptance and support of and from the American people in the primaries, and in any theoretical general election.  

We also recognize that he already is a de facto top-tier candidate because of his fame and his fundraising.

If he were to be the nominee of the Republican Party we would heartily support him and endorse him.  We hope, however, that he is not, as he does not give the center-right coalition the best chance of winning.

Media Watch

Media Watch

County Government News

County Government News

Cities, Towns and Villages

Cities, Towns and Villages

Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch

Movies, Television, Pop Culture

Movies, Television, Pop Culture

  • Movies, Television, Pop Culture
    Selma   ????? We have now seen the Oscar-nominated movie Selma.   Our earlier allusion to criticism that sounded as though it was in an Oliver Stone category for historical fabrication is some...

Sports

Sports

The Major League Baseball Playoffs are not realistic, and destroy the actual meaning of the sport. 

Major League Baseball is unique in this respect—its postseason is markedly different from the way the game is played normally.  No other major league sport suffers from this flaw.

Not that much is wrong with baseball. In some respects it's the most well thought-out sport there is.  The "perfect game" many aficionados say.

But the Major League Baseball postseason experience is unique in the world of professional sports, and not in a good way. 

In fact the playoffs are flawed in such a way as to detract from the sport itself and diminish the game and what it means to be the world champion of the sport. 

Among the Big Four team sports of North America: football, hockey, basketball and baseball—and all the 122 professional major league teams competing in the NFL, NHL, NBA and MLB respectively—it is in baseball alone that the postseason turns the sport itself on its head and makes it reflect something that it is not.  This article will explain why that happens and why it is wrong-headed.

 

Background on the The Frequency of Play

The 30 teams in both the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association teams play a very similar schedule.  On average, each team has a day off between games, sometimes two days off.  Though there are back-to-back games, they are relatively infrequent.  NBA teams play between 14 and 22 back-to-back games a season, and for the NHL it usually ranges between 9 and 19. The NFL has a full week between games, the exception being the new Thursday games that each team plays once, leaving them only four days' rest once a year.

But baseball players play every single day.  Ten days straight, then a day off, then seven more games, then a day off, then ten more games.  Typically a baseball team plays 27 games every 30 days.  For the NHL and NBA it would be 14 per month, and for the NFL the number would be 4.

 

Getting to the Playoffs:  It's a grind

In all four sports, getting to the postseason requires a total team effort—in fact an all-out total organizational effort.  Teams must be deep, have bench strength and the capability of moving players in and out of the lineup, and on and off the roster, who can take the place of key players who go down for an injury, or who have to miss games for whatever reason.  While this is true of the other three major sports as well, it is most certainly even more of a concern for baseball teams because of the sheer volume of games in which a team must field a competitive lineup.

Each league's regular season* is a marathon, not a sprint.  NFL teams play for 17 weeks, 16 games.  The NHL has an 82-game season over six months, paralleled by an NBA season of 84 games over the same timeframe. Baseball is the biggest marathon of all—a true test of resilience and endurance—162 games usually starting around the beginning of April and finishing about the end of September.

NHL teams carry 23-man rosters, of which 20 can be active for any particular game.  The NBA is similar, with 15-man rosters of which 13 can be on the bench for a given game. In the NFL, the teams have 53 players on a roster, but only 46 can suit up on game day.  In Major League Baseball, teams have a 25-man active roster, and all 25 are at the park every day.

 

The Postseason Playoffs:  Sport by Sport

The National Football League:

Of the 32 teams, 12 qualify for the playoffs.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season.  Each team plays once a week, the exception being that the four top teams get the first week off.  For a typical qualifier to reach the Super Bowl, the team must play three consecutive weeks.  At that point both remaining teams have two weeks off before the Super Bowl.

In short, the playoffs, with a game each week, reflects the same means of advancement as is present in regular season grind.

The National Hockey League: 

16 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season: a game, a day off, a game, a day off, a game, a day off, and so on.  Just as in the regular season, there are occasionally two days off.  But the playoffs require the same stamina, the same approach as that required to make the playoffs.

 

The National Basketball Association

16 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  The playoffs are conducted in the exact same manner as the regular season: a game, a day off, a game, a day off, a game, a day off, and so on.  Just as in the regular season, there are occasionally two days off.  But the playoffs require the same stamina, the same approach as that required to make the playoffs.

Major League Baseball

10 of the 30 teams qualify for the postseason.  (Although four of those teams qualify only for a one-game do-or-die play-in game.)

Here is where all similarity to baseball ends. 

Unlike the other three sports whose playoffs mirror the test of the regular season, and whose conditions are the same as the regular season, Major League Baseball playoffs in no way resemble the sport itself.  In hockey, basketball and football, the teams win playoff games and reach the pinacle of the sport in exactly the same way that they qualify to try to do so. 

Not so in baseball.  They are two entirely different concepts.  Teams make the playoffs only because they have depth, five-man pitching rotations and can play day-in and day-out at a high level.  But the baseball playoffs suddenly become a kind of "all-star" game within each team's roster.  MLB playoffs are conducted in a way that more closely follows the NBA and the NHL.  Teams have enormous numbers of days off. 

Here's the key point:  No Major League Baseball team could even qualify for the postseason if they played the same way during the regular season that they do in the playoffs.  None.

In the regular season Major League Baseball teams have to use a 5-man starting rotation, with pitchers pitching every 5th day.  There are not enough days off to have even a four-man rotation, let alone a team with three pitchers.  Even the best team in baseball using only a 4-man rotation, would wear them out, and most likely end up with a record of something like 66-96, or 70-92—and that would be if they were otherwise teh best team in the sport.

 

The 2014 Baseball Postseason is Typical

As examples, last year's World Series teams the Kansas City Royals played only 15 games in 30 days, and the San Francisco Giants played only 17 games in 30 days.  The 12 to 15 days off in the non-baseball fantasy world of the MLB postseason, means that teams can turn to three pitchers and give all of them plenty of rest.  But it isn't the way baseball really works.

At one point, the Royals had 5 consecutive days off, and the Giants had 4.  This never happens in the regular season.  Even the All-Star break is only three days.  Very rarely is there anything beyond a one-day break, and even that happens only a couple of times a month. 

What this means is that neither team used the team that got them to the playoffs.  (The NFL, NBA and NHL teams ALL used the very same teams that got them to the playoffs.) 

Baseball teams use a three-man pitching rotation in the playoffs.  Sometimes, they essentially opt for two pitchers only—conceding the likelihood that some of their games are going to be lost—when their third-, or rarely fourth-best pitcher has to face one of their opponents' two-man or three-man rotation members. 

Imagine an NFL team using only one running back and three wide receivers, instead of rotating through their roster in the course of a playoff game—or using only 4 defensive backs and 4 linebackers, instead of rotating 8 or 9 DBs and 6 or 7 linebackers?  In hockey, would a team use only two or three of their forward lines?  Would an NBA team use only the starting five?  They would never make the post season if they tried to present that product to their fans during the regular season.

Those are the equivalents of what Major League Baseball sets up every fall.  No other sport drags its playoffs out in such a way as to completely change the playing field—completely change the dynamics of its game.

Why Does Baseball Do This?

MLB does this because the TV networks want to drag out the games so that they can try to have one game each day  This requires an unnecessary staggering of games, and creates the phenomenon of 15 off-days in a month.

What about travel days?

What about them?  Baseball has travel days constantly.  A team may play in Chicago one day and in Miami the next, or in New York one day and Phoenix the very next day.  Travel days as a routine part of the game are again, a phenomenon of television, and stretching out the playoffs.

In years past, travel days were employed only when necessary. The famous "subway series" games were played on seven consecutive days.  Why?  Because there was no "travel day" required to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx.  Today, they would put in artificial travel days.

Even fairly long train trips didn't necessarily matter.  The 1948 World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves was played in six consecutive days, October 6 & 7 in Boston, October 8, 9 & 10 in Cleveland, and October 11 back in Boston.

This reflects actual baseball, the way the teams play day-in and day-out, and the kind of unique test that baseball presents to its athletes, its managers and management, and to its fans.

In the modern world of charter planes, teams fly from coast to coast to play games on consecutive days.  The artificial "travel day" should be eliminated so that teams can play in the playoffs in the same way that got them there in the first place.


*All these leagues also have pre-seasons and training camps, which add an additional 6-8 weeks to each player's year.


Email us with your feedback, comments, questions and ideas. 

Religious Issues

Religious Issues

  • Religious Issues
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