Republican Mackenzie Kelly Wins Austin City Council Runoff. Local Paper Declines to Cover It

In a stunning upset, Republican Mackenzie Kelly defeated Democrat incumbent Jimmy Flannigan in Austin’s District 6 runoff Tuesday. Kelly ran on a platform that includes restoring police department funding and ending the city’s permissive homeless camping ordinance. She won with 52% to Flannigan’s 48%, a margin of just about 700 votes overall.

Kelly’s win, and Republican Jennifer Virden’s near-win in District 10, may signal a major shift in Austin voters’ thinking. The Democrat-dominated city was already up in arms over the homeless camping ordinance, which allows homeless people to camp just about anywhere they want all over the city (except city hall) since the council passed it unanimously in the summer of 2019. That has led to encampments under overpasses and even on the fringes of neighborhoods all over Austin. Those camps are unsanitary and unsafe; one of them recently burned.

Then the pandemic struck, and Mayor Steve Adler took an authoritarian approach that has, among other things, badly damaged the city’s once-vibrant live music scene (and his own credibility). .. harming one of Austin’s trademarks, destroying many residents’ ability to make a living at all.

Then the riots struck, and the Austin city council sprinted without thinking at all toward defunding its already short-staffed police department. .. The mayor and city council never considered the likely consequences on crime rates or the city’s living and business climates. They just did what the radical activists told them to do. Crime soared. The city council has shown no signs of caring about it. They have instead promoted a woke “social contract” that is, well, infantile.

Kelly’s win and Virden’s near-miss are significant. So what’s on the front page of the city’s major newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, today?

I used to love to go to conferences in Austin. Now, I am too scared. The homeless are horrible. A man pulled his pants down at 830 am next to the Convention Center and pooped. He could have gone behind parked cars, or trees or even gone into the Convention Center RR, but no. He was either too mentally ill or wanted to disgust everyone. He was an animal marking his territory. Later that same day, another homeless man came out of an alcove toward me after dark. I was not alone, but I swore to never be without my legal gun or to walk in Austin after dark.
And to top it off, I went to the Austin Mall and had to call the police because a homeless man with a live chicken on his head was following some teen girls and scaring them and me to death.

enact some common sense restrictions on the 1st Amendment

Actually, what is needed is "common sense restrictions" on the ^{the Warren Court’s misinterpretation of} the 1st Amendment.
“The” freedom of the press was written and understood as freedom as it existed and as it was limited before the ratification of the Constitution. None of the rights enumerated in the first eight amendments created novel rights. instead, the enumerated rights were actually, in a way, window dressing - the guts of the BoR was
Amendment 9
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

and

Amendment 10 The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The right of states to censor pornography, 1A notwithstanding, has never been questioned, even by the Warren Court.
Likewise the right of a government official to sue for libel was never questioned, either - until the Warren Court unanimously nullified all prior case law:
". . . libel can claim no talismanic immunity from constitutional limitations. It must be measured by standards that satisfy the First Amendment” (NY Times Co. v. Sullivan).
In a way it kinda sorta makes sense, because in the UK libel law is a real danger to freedom of expression. But. Trouble is, here we don’t have ideological competition amongst the major journalism outlets of the wire services. Democrats go along and get along (famously) with the journalism cartel, and never get libeled. The only politicians who get libeled are Republicans. It is that which has to stop, and SCOTUS must overrule Sullivan in order for that to be accomplished.

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