As Governor Mary Fallin has pointed out to the press recently, Oklahoma is a very conservative state that won't cotton to a socialist...and she was speaking to MSNBC, of all things, which is an eyebrow raiser in its own right. And she said this as Bernie Sanders appeared in Tulsa (a known blue pocket in deep red Oklahoma), as he drove an enormous turn-out. As liberal as Tulsa looks, it's nonetheless an essential part of Oklahoma's economic scenario, given its location near interstate traffic AND its proximity to a port with access to Mississippi River barge traffic--both of which are advantageous in the flow of commerce on a large, historic scale.
Here's the bigger kicker, though--Oklahoma appears to be polling in favor of Trump in Oklahoma on the GOP side, and he's not only a celebrity creature of NBC but has good things to say about Planned Parenthood, getting away with pandering to the anti-abortion crowd in the same breath. You'd think that evangelical support would go towards the Huckabee candidacy, never pandering to anti-abortionists while being completely against Planned Parenthood regardless of anything else it does--but it hasn't.
Then again, the governor doesn't come out dead set against gays like a lot of Oklahomans do, and Oklahoma cast approval of Wesley Clark for POTUS when nobody else in the country did.
Oklahoma defies the typical labels carried by both major parties, despite efforts of state party leaders to demand otherwise. Both of them. Thus this recent decision by Democrats to include Independents in their primaries was a wise strategic move regarding Oklahoma, but it also signals a break in the inter-Party agreements to maintain lopsided ballot access to the exclusion of all other parties and to the exclusion of Independents. The rise of the Tea Party and the GOP pandering to the same simply exhibited how weak it actually was, given the stated position of the Tea Party that the GOP wasn't conservative enough and that Dubya was to be despised...evidence of which was Jeb's failure to rise in the current GOP.
And yet Oklahoma saw fit to name a state highway after Dubya. Liberal move, Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is clearly shifting liberal. No bigger posterboy for that is Enid City government. Case closed.
Feb. 26 Friday UPDATE, Endorsement Polka Edition: As I type this, I'm listening to Ted Cruz's wax loquacious about Chris Christie's endorsement of Donald Trump--and I'm amazed at just how leftist Ted Cruz has turned, lambasting "corporate welfare", completely against job creators hiring illegal immigrants while in the same breath say he's not only in favor of job creation but championing what unions have been championing: workplace safety and higher wages, though I've recalled him saying things along the lines of being against a minimum wage somewhere in the past. Those things are what Democrats favor and say they're fighting for, all the way down to the concept behind why Ralph Nader saw to it that there's an OSHA department in federal government. Adding wow on top of wow is Rush Limbaugh's endorsement of this Republican leftist. Who'd-a thunk it.
The Koch bros. on the other hand are getting behind Rubio, bottled-water-guzzling warts and all. Truth of the matter is that Rubio is as close to mainstream as the Republican establishment can get, as if it didn't get the message the Tea Party sent 'em the first time: Republican voters don't like the Republican Party establishment, and there's been no greater blazing sign in that regard by the failure of all previous established Republican leaders getting brutally kicked to the curb, and even by evangelicals who think Trump's a better deal than Huckabee.
The big question du jour is "who can stop Trump?" Well, the people who have been voting for him prefers that this question not get an answer, not even from leftist Ted Cruz. Yeah--I'm popping big buckets of popcorn for this year's primaries.
Bernie vs Hillary? Who are they?
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