What’s interesting in the news today?
1. WOW. Talk about stunning. He was well ahead in most polls.
From NBCNews “In a stunning upset, Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-highest ranking Republican in the House, lost his primary challenge to a tea party-backed candidate Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
Economics professor Dave Brat defeated Cantor to become the GOP nominee for Virginia’s 7th congressional district.
Cantor, who serves as the House majority leader, heavily outspent Brat and was widely expected to survive the challenge from the right.
Brat painted the seven-term congressman as a Washington insider who has become too liberal to represent the Richmond-area district. He accused Cantor of supporting immigration reform that would give “amnesty” to those living in the United State illegally.”
And as a lame duck, will he push even harder?
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GOP leadership is in chaos over it.
From NationalJournal “Befuddlement hit and lingered within the House GOP leadership ranks as Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s election fate was unwinding on Tuesday. Cantor lost in a major upset to primary challenger Dave Brat.
A senior Republican leadership aide described the mood as “chaos for the leadership ranks.”
“We’re absolutely stunned. Honestly, we really can’t believe it,” said the aide, who likened it to the 2004 election defeat of Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who was Senate minority leader at the time.”
I’d say Boehner’s a little nervous about retaining his leadership post about now.
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So who is this guy?
From ABCNews “Meet Dave Brat, an economics and ethics professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, who launched a long-shot — and ultimately successful — bid to oust House Majority Leader Eric Cantor from his seat representing Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. “
“Brat, who admits that he has supported several Cantor candidacies over the years, says he mounted his improbable primary campaign because the House GOP’s No. 2 leader has lost touch with his constituents, “veering from the Republican creed.”
“Brat calls himself as a “free market guy,” and says he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He also pledged never to increase taxes and to stick to a five-year promise not to vote to increase the debt limit.
“This isn’t a personal race. I’m not running against Eric,” he stressed in the May interview. “I’m just running on the founding principles that Adam Smith and free markets – they made us the greatest nation on the Earth. All right? It’s no mystery. Our rights, tradition, along with free markets and the Judeo-Christian tradition all together made us the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. I think we’re veering off course a little bit there and I want to get us back on that course that brought us to greatness.”
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2. Things are worsening in Iraq.
From HotAir “Mosul falls to al-Qaeda as US-trained security forces flee”
“And not just Mosul, according to some reports, but the entire northern province of Nineveh has now fallen into al-Qaeda’s control. Parliamentarians from the region want a declaration of emergency and immediate government intervention, but the forces that had been in Mosul have fled — some of which abandoned their uniforms as well as their posts as the ISIS forces swarmed into the city:
Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.
Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants.”
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3. And once again, US arms fall into the hands of the bad guys.
From TheNYT “The insurgent fighters who routed the Iraqi army out of Mosul on Tuesday did not just capture much of Iraq’s second-largest city. They also gained a windfall of arms, munitions and equipment abandoned by the soldiers as they fled — arms that were supplied by the United States and intended to give the troops an edge over the insurgents.
The problem is not a new one, but it looms larger now that the United States is shifting its counterterrorism strategy away from using American armed forces directly, and toward relying on allied or indigenous troops and security forces supplied and trained by the United States. President Obama proposed last week that a $5 billion fund be set up to finance such efforts.
But those proxy forces do not always prove equal to the task, and when they buckle, the United States finds itself having unwittingly armed its enemies — a problem the Obama administration has been trying to avoid in Syria by carefully limiting its aid to the opposition there. The militants who swept into control of Mosul on Tuesday are believed to be connected to the main Islamist militant group fighting in Syria.”
Which is why we shouldn’t be arming them in Syria either.
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4. Gee, maybe this has something to do with the current fiasco.
From CNSNews “The number of unauthorized migrants apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S. Southwest border has decreased by 74.7% since 2000, according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report.
According to the U.S. Border Patrol, there were 1,643,679 illegal alien apprehensions, defined as the arrest of a removable alien, along the Southwest border in fiscal year 2000. The southwest border includes Big Bend, Del Rio, El Centro, El Paso, Laredo, Rio Grande Valley, San Diego, Tucson, and Yuma. Since 2000, the number of apprehensions along this border decreased by 74.7%, totaling 420,789 apprehensions in fiscal year 2013.
In the May 2, 2014 CRS report, Apprehensions of Unauthorized Migrants along the Southwest Border: Fact Sheet, it states, “Southwest border apprehensions began to decline mid-decade, dropping by 8% between FY2005 and FY2006. They fell more rapidly between FY2006 and FY2011, by an average of 14% each year. Since FY2011, apprehensions increased by 26%.”
And the only reason for the increase is they’ve changed how they count, and include those turned away at the border as apprehensions/deportations. The Obama admin numbers here are about as accurate as the unemployment numbers. Just fuzzy math.
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Wandering Views 
This is interesting.
http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2014/06/11/the-russian-confederates-of-novorossia/
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Most of the fighters, on both sides, are fighting with US arms.
Some Russian, mostly US.
I supported the Iraq war at first. But I didn’t understand Islam then. Neither did our leaders, but someone there should have. They have been advised by the likes of Rita Katz who wrote Terrorist Hunter in 2003, and Steve Emerson for whom she worked. They knew what was going on and advised both Clinton and Bush. We should have just destroyed the al Quida in Afghanistan and left. We can’t change a culture. But now that we’re there, it would be disastrous to those we leave behind.
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As for Ukraine, we can’t do anything about that.
To pretend that we can makes us look silly.
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Obama is fouling his own country.
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That’s his plan Bob, That’s his plan.
In 2008 Rush got into trouble with the media when he said, “I hope he fails”.
So far, he has been successful.
What do you think the release of the five Taliban is about?
How about the kids flooding Texas?
Maybe the carbon emission limits?
etc. forever.
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I was in Zumba this morning thinking about the falls of Mosul and Tiblit (sp?) and I suddenly couldn’t dance anymore, I felt so sad. So, I left early.
I can’t imagine what those who have fought in Iraq are thinking now. I felt so ashamed and sad. The poor people of Iraq–their lives have been so difficult for so long and now . . .
I don’t think anyone learned any lessons from VA’s primary. All I know is what I read on Twitter, and folks there think it has to do with immigration reform. Sigh.
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People with some knowledge (like Brent Scowcroft and Big Bush) could see in advance just how dumb it was for Little Bush to invade Iraq. In hindsight, the world might be a safer place if Hussein had defeated the US. Iran wouldn’t have a new neighboring ally and Al Qaeda wouldn’t have a new base.
I feel very bad for the families of the people we lost and those who were injured. I also feel bad for the children who will pay interest on the trillion dollars we spent destabilizing that part of the world.
I view the Cantor defeat as a unique event. Cantor (and his staff) were very pompous. Pomposity doesn’t go over well in central Virginia.
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http://www.google.com/gwt/x?wsc=yh
It is to early to tell, but there may be some good news here. If this is a general Sunni uprising and they regain control, Shia Iran may lose its new ally. In such a case, the US would have lost 5000 men and spent $1,000,000,000,000 and accomplished nothing at all. Where it stands now, we have actually made things much worse.
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Let’s try this link:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10891354/Iraq-crisis-500000-flee-Mosul-as-Sunni-jihadists-pose-mortal-threat-to-nation.html
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Chas — welcome to the dark side I’ve been there since 2003. Bush’s error in judgment will continue to haunt the US strategically, financially and militarily for years to come.
There was a sharp decline in migrants crossing the border after 2008 which may explain the lower apprehension rate. The current increase may simply indicate a better economy attracting migrants. Simple capitalism.
Cantor’s team probably had a dangerous mix of arrogance and complacency.
The US is by far the world’s largest exporter of arms so its reasonable to expect both sides of a war to have American arms (with an exception of the cheap and reliable AK47)
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