[Alberta's Child]

Mitch McConnell isn't even among the top reasons why Doug Jones won yesterday. I can think of a few bigger ones than him:

1. Roy Moore ... face it, the guy was an awful candidate.
2. the Republican voters of Alabama ... their vote (or lack of such) was clear on this one.
3. Gov. Kay Ivey ... why call a special election if the guy in office was originally appointed to serve out the remainder of his predecessor's term, unless the only point in calling for the special election was to get him out of office?
4. Steve Bannon ... is Moore really the kind of loser we can expect him to back in all these GOP primaries next year?

Item #3 is a big one. If the President of the United States was going to end up endorsing Luther Strange for the GOP primary anyway, then what the hell was the point of having the special election in the first place? HE WAS ALREADY IN THAT SEAT FOR THE REMAINDER OF SESSIONS' TERM.

[Political Junkie Too]

I'm not being so quick to blame Bannon.

We need someone to back insurgents to challenge incumbents, and without a quarterback like Bannon to coordinate a national effort, it will be a haphazard disjointed movement at best.

Remember that Democrats have to defend 23 seats in 2018, and Jones has to run again in 2020. Republicans should grow their lead next year. After two years of Doug Jones, Alabama may sour on his liberal votes.

The problem is that without carpetbagging, Bannon will have to go with the best that each state has to offer. The hope is that a Bannon can attract people to step up and not run away from the cause because of McConnell's scorched earth fragging.

-PJ

[Black Agnes]

“3. Gov. Kay Ivey ... why call a special election if the guy in office was originally appointed to serve out the remainder of his predecessor’s term, unless the only point in calling for the special election was to get him out of office?”

This is how you know the uniparty fix was in.

The rest was window dressing.

[pepsionice]

If you sat and looked at the whole landscape of Alabama since 2013, you’d come to realize that there is an epic saga of a story to be told.

The Republicans in Montgomery (the state ‘thugs’) are considered to be a problem now (corruption, lobbyists, etc). So we had this episode brew up with the Governor (Bentley). He got all lusted-up with lobbyist married gal who helped to get him into office. He rewarded her with a $200k a year job with the state, and even got her husband with a big state job.

Bentley’s wife eventually figured all of this out....then divorced Bentley.

The state folks figured this out, and the job deal got them onto an ethics situation. They wanted to impeach the guy....but hold on...first, they needed the state attorney general to investigate.

Who was the state AG? Luther Strange. Yep.

Luther played out a delay game, and spent a number of months pretending do something. Then the election occurs....Trump wins....and Sessions leaves.

Folks believe that Luther Strange made a deal with Bentley to get the job of Senator. Luther went to DC, and Bentley ‘retires’. Then we get Ivey as the replacement governor.

Ivey knows nothing about this deal, and is mostly uncorrupted. She thinks Strange is unethical, and calls for a special election (she didn’t have to do it). Some folks think she’s fed up with the corrupted system in Montgomery and wanted to fix things. I doubt if she wanted Moore to be in this race.

Across Alabama, there was no real enthusiasm for Strange, and only mild enthusiasm for Moore....but beyond them....no one really had any appeal. Moore had one single plus....the church-crowd in the state. On the other side of the coin, probably 40-percent of GOP voters considered Moore a nut.

That’s how we got to this position. I think it’s all an epic story....fitting of a Forrest Gump-like saga.

Here’s the last observation thought. Jones has to run again in 2020. To be honest, he just ain’t going to get 40-odd million again from all those PAC groups, and it was simply a lucky one-in-a-million election where Moore was the only real option with no one really hyped up much for Moore. Jones likely loses in 2020, and things shift around again.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Mitch McConnell isn't even among the top reasons why Doug Jones won yesterday. I can think of a few bigger ones than him:

1. Roy Moore ... face it, the guy was an awful candidate.
2. the Republican voters of Alabama
3. Gov. Kay Ivey
4. Steve Bannon .

Obviously Roy Moore isn’t the second coming of Ronald Reagan but then, who is?

You left out the obvious:

1 - ∞ "The MSM.”

Win or (unfortunately) lose, Judge Moore has always faced the need to sue the people who unfairly attacked his reputation. I submit that he should do a GoFundMe if necessary to raise the money to launch a serious counterattack. It isn’t even necessary for him to sue all of his accusers; he should focus only on the lowest-hanging fruit cases which he can - despite the passage of time since the putative events - disprove.

The crucial point is that he not limit his suit to the accusing women, who are peripheral to the real issue. The defendants in his suit must include the Associated Press and its membership. And the suit must not only allege libel, it must allege violation of TheSherman Anti-Trust Act, which authorizes triple damages.

And it should, preferably, make Moore’s own tort only part of the vast pattern of what Adam Smith called out:  

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

The AP “wire” is a continual virtual meeting of all major journalism outlets, which has been in effect since before the Civil War. It has the effect of unifying journalism into a de facto illegal trust. (The reason it is “liberal” is that journalism is about bad news, and bad news is functionally criticism of society. Journalists within the AP “Borg", knowing this, yet claim that journalism is objective - which could be true only if negativity is objectivity. Since “the conceit that 'negativity is objectivity’” is a very workable definition of “cynicism,” plainly the AP “Borg” is cynical about society. Criticism of society implies a “there oughta be a law” response. That is, skepticism about society promotes faith in government, and cynicism about society implies naiveté towards government. And, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, that is precisely the defining characteristic of socialism).

SCOTUS found the AP in violation of Sherman back in 1945. Back then, of course, the nominal mission of the AP - the conservation of scarce expensive telegraph bandwidth is the propagation of news nationwide - made the AP “too big to fail.” Now, of course, "scarce expensive telegraph bandwidth” is dirt cheap. Freedom of the press is predicated on free entry into the field of journalism. The unification of journalism under the aegis of the AP moots the foundation of freedom of the press, leaving us with the conceit that journalism is “the fourth Estate.” There are not supposed to be “Estates” in America under the Constitution.

If there is a way of making lemonade out of the lemon Moore defeat, IMHO it would be that Moore becomes the lead plaintiff a class-action suit which alleges, and proves, enough torts to destroy the AP.