SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 9:55 P.M. ET: 

GRIM IN VIRGINIA – Not a good night for our side.  With a larger-than-expected margin, Ralph Northam has defeated Republican Ed Gillespie for the Virginia governorship. With 99 percent of the vote in, Northam has 53.6 percent and Gillespie 45.2 percent, an 8.4-point spread.  The final polls showed Northam with about a 3-5-point lead.   Hillary Clinton carried Virginia a year ago by about 5 points.  Thus, Northam bested Hillary.  Most analysts attributed Northam's victory to the huge number of government workers living in northern Virginia, near Washington, and the African-American vote.  However, the usual suspects, led by The New York Times, are playing it as a YUGE defeat for President Trump.

THE THE GRIMLY EXPECTED – New York City's profoundly leftist Mayor Bill de Blasio, lover of Castro, support of the Sandinistas, was easily re-elected tonight, giving him four more years to do nothing of value.  After that he's term-limited.  As usual, the Republicans barely ran a mayoral campaign in the heavily Democratic city.  For a Republican to win, he literally must take over the party himself.  The last pure Republican to win the mayoralty was Rudy Giuliani, who became a truly great mayor and showed that crime could be confronted and defeated.   His successor, the very capable Mike Bloomberg, had no lasting party affiliation, and could best be described as a moderate.  De Blasio could have been beaten by a strong Republican with an imaginative platform, but the Republican Party in New York couldn't be bothered.

A NEEDED APOLOGY – FROM BREITBART:   Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist and cartoonist David Horsey apologized to White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday, after publishing an article in which he mocked her appearance, calling her a “slightly chunky soccer mom.”
Horsey’s “body-shaming” took up the first two full paragraphs of his column, which went on to accuse Sanders of lying on behalf of President Donald Trump.  Breitbart News highlighted the column on Friday morning, and Fox News made inquiries to the Times. On Friday afternoon, those paragraphs had been removed from the article, and replaced by an apology from Horsey:  "I want to apologize to Times readers — and to Sarah Huckabee Sanders — for a description that was insensitive and failed to meet the standards of our newspaper. It also failed to meet the expectations I have for myself. It surely won’t be my last mistake, but this particular error will be scrupulously avoided in my future commentaries. I’ve removed the offending description."  Even liberal journalists can occasionally do the right thing.  Savor the moment.

November 7, 2017