660-Martha-McSally-AP

“Arizona Republican Martha McSally on Wednesday was declared the winner of the final 2014 congressional race — giving her party its largest House majority in 83 years when the new Congress convenes next month.” McSally, America’s first female combat pilot, beat incumbent Rep. Ron Barber by 167 votes. “Barber was a staffer for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when he and the congresswoman were wounded during a political event in Tucson in January 2011. Barber then won a special election to finish Giffords’ term. He defeated McSally in 2012 to win a full term in Congress, in a race separated by fewer than 2,500 votes.” So Gabby Giffords’ old Tucson district has moved from a solid anti-gun vote over to the pro-2A column. How great is that?   [h/t Dirk Diggler]

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97 COMMENTS

  1. still waiting on the email from Giffords and Space Cowboy claiming victory . . . but asking for more $$$ to fight the evil gun lobby.

  2. Not sure this is an improvement. Being that I was active duty Air Force, let’s just say miss (name redacted) ain’t what she appears to be. Let us leave it at that before the locusts (aka attorneys) find us all.

    • Well, for those who aren’t activity duty or retired, care to offer a clue as to how she isn’t what she appears to be?

      • He offered his evidence further downthread, in response to me telling him (in bold, so you can spot it easily) to put up or STFU. About six people replied pointing out what BS it was.

    • So, does this mean that because she has issues in her past you are allied with the Gifford crowd? Perhaps you should have voted in the primaries. This is an all or nothing fight for our country. I do not care if she claims she speaks to extraterrestrials or the reincarnation of Thomas Jefferson, if she is in a one-on-one fight against a Progressive, I support her 100%. Gentlemen (and ladies) this is a war for our freedoms, and we can only win it with numbers. Geez. Okay, I feel better now that I got that out. 🙂

      • I don’t know anything about Martha McSally either and I don’t see a downside here, but just because someone is opposing a progressive isn’t enough reason to get behind them. Maybe in the general election it’s a clear cut decision but early in the process, candidates need to be carefully considered otherwise you’re just giving up a seat to the left. I’m thinking about the sad case of Christine “I dabbled in witchcraft” O’donnell in Delaware.

        • ” just because someone is opposing a progressive isn’t enough reason to get behind them.”

          If the progressive in question is an incumbent, I could agree with that, since there is a record to judge him on. Otherwise, yes it is enough reason, the past couple decades are enough to prove to me that Democrats refuse to reveal their actual planned agenda until they’ve been elected. Beginning with Clinton, who never mentioned national health care nor gun control while campaigning, but introduced both concepts immediately after the elections, did not even wait until inaugurated. That was effectively a flat-out LIE to the American people, as well as near treason, since the reason was that he knew he would not be elected if he disclosed his real plans.

        • I’m not saying you should support the progressive candidate, just don’t let emotion take over and do your homework before the primary to make sure you’re not backing the wrong conservative candidate that will likely turn out to be a batshit crazy embarrassment.

          Two years ago the dems in PA voted in a media darling for Attorney General that has turned out to be just that. It’s actually quite fun to watch the slow motion train wreck taking place.

        • This is what I’m referring too.

          http://blog.pennlive.com/capitol-notebook/2014/12/heres_how_us_rep_bob_brady_mad.html#incart_m-rpt-1

          This is the same attorney general that invalidated Florida nonresident carry permits held by Pennsylvanians in Pennsylvania calling it the “Florida Loophole”, even though the FL carry permit costs 6 times as much as a PA license to carry, requires proof of competence with a firearm and fingerprinting where the PA license doesn’t.

    • Thanks for the link below about this. It seems that a couple of guys are mad about the a-10 being scrapped. I don’t know how much I believe because it says in there that the people were supporting her opponent. His arguments seem really petty. She’s a fake because of a 24 round difference in what the plane holds?? The capacity is higher than the 1150 he stated too. Was she counting Zuni rockets? 6 pods with 4 rounds each would make the 1174, correct? This would be a appropriate loadout for someone running close air support. This is why primary elections are so important to me. But I will take progun over antigun any day. As far as the fear of her flipping when we need her the most, how is that any different than John Boehner.

    • ST, Peddle your bullshit smear elsewhere. You’ve already been completely exposed, now its time to disappear.

      • Leave him alone!
        .
        When a fool wants to continue advertising his foolishness, just sit back and enjoy the show. It is useless to attempt to school him/her anyway.
        .

  4. Sweet, so national reciprocity and a roll back of GCA 68 and NFA 34 are in order?

    “Well you know, the enemy of the good is the perfect.”

    “No we need a GOP president too, then we shall have victory.”

    All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again- bsg reimagined.

    • Let’s hope there isn’t some galactic republican blunder that disrupts a golden chance. Obama will be tough to out-blunder, so let’s keep our fingers crossed while hoping for the best.

  5. Well, I’m mainly glad she won because (a) she isn’t a Dem who will toe the national-party anti-gun line faithfully, and (b) the Dem who would toe the national party anti-gun line, and his former employer Giffords-Kelly went to the anti-gun gutter to try to defeat her.

  6. Despite her service and accomplishments, I worry that she is going to have to really earn those 167 votes…..

  7. Yay! Another tough-talking Republican who will re-elect Boehner as Speaker and immediately surrender to Obama. So F’ing sick of it. Can we just fast forward twenty years to what we all know is coming and get it over with?

    • I don’t know Jonathan, what is coming? if the future hasn’t always, been as great as advertised, maybe it won’t be Armageddon either.

  8. The Giffords sponsored ads attacking McSally were so putrid, even the liberal media called her out, calling them “base and vile.”

    I rejoice when smear campaigns lose. Call me an optimist, but Americans just might be growing tired of mud-slinging politics.

  9. Yay, hooray, pip-pip, and all that rot!

    May she be as tough as I hope the lady from Iowa turns out, I and wish my congress lady could be.

  10. Reading some of the anti-McSally comments above, I’m sure that I have somehow traveled to an alternate universe — call it Bizarro World if you will — where bad is good, up is down and sane is insane.

    Another brick in the Democrat wall has fallen. A seat formerly occupied by an anti-gun half-witted troll has been flipped. Rejoice, morons. We won.

    • We really can be our own worst enemies. Clearly, some of our commentors would like to snatch defeat from victory. Some folks just can’t allow themselves to win.

    • Tucson won’t re-elect her unless she moves away from a lot of the establishment GOP platform. It’s just the way Tucson is, so expect McSally to move left on some issues in order to get re-elected. But even a lot of AZ Dems I know are mostly pro-gun… at least in a Dan Baum sort of way.

        • Yeah well progressives have a way of doing that. This is the same city that would spend millions of dollars to build new soccer fields in an attempt to divert soccer tournaments from the Phoenix area, yet allow the roads to fall apart and claim it’s the State Republican legislation that is to blame. I joke that those shiny new soccer fields are useless if the soccer teams can’t drive on the roads to get there.

      • Who cares? If she honors the 2nd, much of the other issues regarding governance and liberty will follow.

        • Will you care if one of those issues she supports is UBC’s? I expext that to be her stance in the Tucson district if another UBC bill comes to a vote. Is she better than the alternative? Sure, but politicians are supportive of their self preservation before their oaths to the Constitution.

    • How can a POTG not cut some slack to a woman who’s right on education, right on regulation, and spent months flying an A-10 Wharthog in Afghanistan helping to reduce the stock of, among other things, 30 mm cannon shells?

    • Yes of course the Democrats deserve to lose. But you think the GOP will undo anything? Give me a break man, aren’t you sick of it yet…Bush 1&2 were disasters for freedom and this time around will be no better. In fact, it will be much worse as I expect the next regime to start another world war.

      • But you think the GOP will undo anything?

        Do you mean like undoing the AWB? No, I can’t imaging the GOP undoing that.

        Oh, wait . . . .

          • are you sure the repubs are not chomping at the bit to merely re-write/tweak the legislation? consider the utter chaos of actually eliminating o-care.

        • The AWB expired. That is meaningfully different than actively undoing something. As always it is easier and more popular to make more laws than strike down established laws. Striking down GCA or the like is next to impossible as even the gun toting-est reps support established gun laws.

        • Drew, the AWB expired because there weren’t enough Dems willing to throw their jobs away to make it permanent, either in 1994 or 2004. And it was masterfully arranged to come up for expiration just before an election, anybody voting for extending it knew they would be out of a job in weeks. That is an active effort by Republicans, not mere coincidence.
          And we need to start supporting Reps who do NOT support current gun laws.

      • When you are not in a position for victory, the proper move is to delay the enemy, while planning for when a better opportunity strikes. Even if all we get is no threat of further erosion on gun rights, that is better than an advancement.

        On the other hand, I agree with your sentiment and the old saying, if you aren’t advancing, you are retreating. But think of it long term. CCW gains, e.g., are only a couple of decades old at best. If it can be preserved as long as possible, and we knock back a few restriction here and there, it gets poised to get accepted more readily in our culture. That is where the victory lies. We have to preserve what we have in order to lay the ground work for the counter assault.

        • to borrow from a famous general…..attack ! attack ! attack !

          btw, that’s saul alinski’s mantra in his ‘rules for radicals’.

    • Exactly Ralph, to quote Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad “learn how to take ‘yes’ for an answer!”

    • McSally’s already proved she’s not interested in the “marry rich” path to “independence” and success. She’s no McCain.

      • agree she did not “marry rich”, but look at what the repub leadership has done with their new mandate. now jebbie has mccain advising him on how to win without the same electorate that just handed the party with an historic win. we saw this in 2010, when mcconnel and whoever was house speaker told the incoming conservatives to “sit down and shut up, we aren’t giving you squat in return for our new majority”. most of those then freshmen reps just moved to the middle (where they become demo lite). both parties believe in big government, big spending, they just argue over who can most effectively control the levers of power.

        • What have the Repubs done with their mandate? Dude, they haven’t even been sworn in yet. The Senate remains under Dem control. I’m surprised you don’t know that. I mean it’s been in all the newspapers and everything.

          • yes, it has been in all the papers:
            – giving dems a full fy budget instead of a CR until feb
            – only 22 repubs voted on a symbolic point of order declaring BO’s executive amnesty unconstitutional
            – declaring a government shut down would not happen, no matter the lawlessness of the pres
            – mcconnell declaring much earlier that he and the GOP would “kick the tea party’s ass”

            afraid the GOP leadership already stated the desire to ignore the meaning of the overwhelming victory in november, and use it only to continue their left-leaning, liberal, republic-destroying quest for wealth and power.

        • Yeah, George, the Reps should have shut down the Federal government, because that worked out so well before.

          • yes it did. the last ‘shutdown’ led to an enormous republican party defeat in the 2014 mid-term elections.

          • you are right; bad move for repubs. the last ‘shutdown’ did nothing to prevent an enormous republican party win in the 2014 mid-term elections.

        • The shutdown cost the Republicans the Virginia Governor’s mansion. It sucked the life out of Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign. Do you think that the Republicans would have had a big year if they shut down the government last September? Voters have a short memory and the this year there were other issues. I am tired of this RINO meme. A RINO seems to be a person who doesn’t agree with me on 100% of the issues that mean something to me. The Republican that has acted like an actual RINO is Rand Paul. He looks like a throwback to the now defunct Democrat Leadership Council.

          • RINO? maybe….someone who always puts party above principle? maybe…..someone who things getting re-elected is more important than standing up for (and maybe going down for) doing the right thing? maybe…someone who thinks “not being as bad as democrats” is a valid campaign strategy? maybe…someone who believes you gotta go along, to get along? maybe….someone who will sometimes trip over principle, but pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing happened?

            did we just put in a bunch of representatives of the people in order for the establishment/country club/big money/cover my ass millionaires to decide membership in the senate and house, not representation of the electorate is the end game?

          • one day, northern Virginia (where the DC political class, consultants and petty burr-a-crats live will be annexed into the district.

        • @tdiinva I would make the argument that the government shutdown shouldn’t have been a factor in the VA governor’s race anyways. If NOVA hadn’t become such a “refugee camp” of fleeing Democrats from neighboring states, the whole rest of the state wouldn’t be turning purple as we speak. I also seem to remember the Republican Governor and his wife of the time being investigated for various campaign violations. Regardless if there was any truth to that, it’s going to reflect badly on the Republican nominee.

        • Ralph You need to review what “shut down the Fed gov’t is” .

          Yes shut it down, where suspends pay/spending for ALL, not DOD, fed employees/agencies. Then it would mean something.

        • Federal Employees and contractors in Virginia are less liberal than you think they are. Fairfax County just sent Barbara Comstock to Washington and Arlington elected a conservative Republican to the County Board. The Shutdown certainly did have huge negative impact on Cuccinelli. The local news spent all its time on the shutdown and the off-off year election in Virginia. Once it ended Cuccinelli made a strong campaign and almost pulled it off. Had there been a month’s campaigning he would have one. People who say “see the Republicans won in 2014 so the shutdown in 2013 didn’t matter are committing logical fallacy in connecting the two events. A reporter once asked British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan what derail the Tories election chances in the election cycle. His answer was “events dear boy, events.” There were a lot of events between 2013 and 2014.

    • Not until Jan. Tom. Until then, the Dems control the Senate and they don’t care what they do now because they’re already all done. Lame ducks are dangerous because they have nothing to lose.

      • i understand that the dems have control of the senate until January but it was the republican control HOUSE that passed the budget bill that obama wanted without much issue. Pretty sad when John and Barack want the same thing! Johnny boy needs to remember that we won. And yes we won even after a government shut down.

  13. Gifford spent a lot of political capital to win this race. So wonderful’ll to see it was in vain.

    Anti 2A is getting to be the political kiss of death. In a 50/50 electorate, pro gun sentiment is one of the few things that cut across party lines. If being anti 2A cost a Democrat even 5% of the Democrat vote, he is going to lose, more often than not.

    • “Anti 2A is getting to be the political kiss of death.”

      Ask the citizens of Washington state if they agree its the “political kiss of death.”

      • Actually, it is. That’s why the anti-gun cabal used the initiative process — the republic’s elected representatives had already refused to pass legislation nearly identical to the initiative, knowing it would cause their more informed constituents to unelect them PDQ.

        So, to get around that republican safeguard, the Command-and-Control Complex enlisted sympathetic plutocrats to buy votes directly from the uninformed populace.

  14. Before folks break out the champagne, perhaps a more detailed evaluation of the Congresswoman’s AF service history beyond the breathless PR is in order.

    Here’s a hint-all is not what it seems. I have misgivings about her being in Congress which goes beyond D versus R. Better the devil you know then a chameleon who flips at the brink.

    • this is the second (at least), “i know something you don’t” posting. why the secrecy? if what causes you misgivings is true, why not put it out there? if it is untrue, what’s the point of the comment? i don’t trust repubs anymore, myself, but am glad to shout the reasons (RINO, demo lite, contributing to the slow death of the republic, big spenders, big govt….). it would be good to let the rest of us know important elements of the congresswoman’s character, political stance, or other element that casts a pall on her presumed positives.

    • Indeed, ST. That’s twice now with you insinuating there are problems with this woman, but without providing details.

      Put up or STFU.

        • thanks for the link.

          lotta unverifiables in the article, but interesting information, nonetheless. regardless, a 167 vote margin says the district is truly 50-50 red/blue, or mcsally did such a poor job she nearly lost what should have been a ‘no contest’. it also means she needs to be able to win big next time (or maybe this is just a token office enroute to a senate run).

        • Frankly, unless you personally know her, I smell BS.

          This account may well be true, but over the years I’ve read such ridiculous gossip about the service record of every single former military person running for office that I don’t believe any of it without further verification.

        • So you just take this “Chuck Norris” word for it?

          He attacks her for saying the A-10 holds 1174 rounds, when in reality it holds 1150?

          Well in reality, it holds up to 1350. But the standard payload is 1174 rds.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunderbolt_II#cite_ref-Jenkins_p64_63-1

          So his very first comment was bull-hockey. If you are going to be anal, at least be right. Since it his attempt to establish redibility, he fails at the gate.

          The author is no objective reporter, repeatedly misspelling her name McSilly.

          I have no dog in the fight and never heard of her before. But you shouldn’t expect us to be stupid.

        • I can only talk from hearsay, but I was speaking to one of my 2A colleagues (who also was an Air Force Mechanic back in the day) and he was not very enthusiastic for McSally. At asked his reasoning and he told me that his contacts in the Air Force had contentions with McSally’s purported achievements in the AirForce. Since I I wasn’t in the Air Force and wasn’t familiar with their SOP, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was mostly critical about her operational claims and saying she was quick to pass the buck on to others. He also quoted from his hill contacts that she was not on the forefront of saving the A-10 from retirement. They claimed she wasn’t even involved with the committee hearings. She only showed up last minute to voice her support but contributed nothing to the actual report to save the aircraft. He also said that McSally was just going to step toe to the line to McCain’s positions, since she received substantial support (political and money wise) from his campaign office. Again, take everything I said with a grain of salt, but I only voted for her because I got sick and tired of the anti-2a campaign group ads that ran against her. You know the usual crap, like a vote for her was a vote against safety for our children or common sense gun laws, that usual tripe.

        • I don’t read anything in that link worthy of swift-boating the congresswoman elect. Maybe I missed something? If so, let’s call them resume enhancements and move on. Congratulations to her and the people of Arizona.

        • As a retired AF pilot, let me tell you something. There is zero reason to expect any pilot to know how many BBs are in the box. That is a question for maintainers, when the gun stops shooting, you are out until you get back on the ground. Maybe the gun broke, maybe it’s out of boolits, maybe an electrical connection came loose, it doesn’t matter because you can’t fix it in the air. Pretending that such knowledge, or lack of it, means anything at all about a pilot is exceeding stupid. As is that link. I suspect both politics and sour grapes.

  15. So Space Cadet Kelly’s vile puppet show failed to win the day for an anti-gun Democrat — sounds like success to me. (And to think I used to actually vote for Democrats…).

  17. I would like to get excited about this, just have not seen any proof that she is not another Boehner/McConnell drone. And given the Republican leadership has come down fully in support of Obolacare and against ending the war on coal and electricity, yea, not all that excited.

  18. I am just thankful that there are no astronauts involved this time. There aren’t, are there? Wow, my short time in space is playing havoc with my grammar neurons.

  19. Many ask if we better off with the Republican versus the Democrat. Absolutely. (I am not a Republican, so please do not make that accusation.) In this all-or-nothing fight for our freedoms, these are the only two sides: Democrat Party or We The People. I allied myself with We The People. Tarnished past or not, this lady is better than a sworn enemy.

    • i think the ongoing debate here is whether the repubs are actually the same as dems, and there is no large representation of “we the people”. there is a shining difference between republicans and conservatives, between politicians and patriots. republicans have already declared they are not interested in the conservative agenda. so it is not how many in the D column vs. how many in the R column. as long as the parties focus our attention on numbers counts of whichever letter, the country loses.

      • I am absolutely NOT represented by any elected official at any level of government, and damned sure not by any appointed or hired government employee at any level of government in America for the last 50 years. We, the citizens, say “no” and they say f*ck you. That is what people are pissed off about. Not the fakirs in Ferguson and what not. Real Americans. We keep voting and we keep getting f*cked.

  23. Excellent for AZ. Giffords is a snake in the grass. She traveled from AZ to WA to support the anti-gun Bloomberg propaganda. I’ve yet too and likely won’t forgive her for sticking her nose in our law business. The man who shot her in no way could have been stopped by the draconian law she supported here in WA.

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