Red States Nowhere Near New York Are Losing Their Minds About Zohran Mamdani

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where the sun comes rising from that little Minnesota town. We begin in Mississippi, where the FBI has been hard at work busting other law-enforcement officers. From the Mississippi Free Press:

In an early morning raid on October 30 around 5 a.m., federal agents arrested the sheriffs of two counties: Sheriff Bruce Williams of Humphreys County and Sheriff Milton M. Gaston of Washington County. The FBI also arrested Marvin Flowers, the chief deputy of Sunflower County. The full list of affected agencies and arrested officers cuts across numerous local agencies, municipal police departments and sheriff’s departments in the Delta. The first series of indictments concerned an alleged conspiracy “ whereby law enforcement officers and their accomplices are alleged to have agreed to provide safe passage for illegal narcotics and drug proceeds to the Mississippi Delta region and ultimately on the last of those runs into Memphis itself,” Acting U.S. Attorney Clay Joyner said during a Thursday afternoon press conference in Oxford, Mississippi. “They did this in return for bribe payments for money. They are also indicted for related firearms offenses and individual counts related to specific runs throughout the Mississippi Delta.”

The FBI alleges a sophisticated scheme by local cops to create a cocaine superhighway through their jurisdictions.

The FBI’s press event describes a network of police protection for drug trafficking, in which many of the officers would escort what they believed to be narcotics across the state and into Memphis. The plot amounted to an extensive network of “ systemic law enforcement corruption that crossed multiple counties in the Delta,” Joyner said. “These corrupt law enforcement officers provided protection to those whom they believed were drug traffickers,” he said. And it was drug dealers themselves whose tips alleging that law enforcement officers were demanding bribes for protection led to the FBI investigation, Joyner said.

Sunflower County can count itself lucky that it’s not a Venezuelan fishing boat. And this is not a good time for Mississippi law enforcement to be undermanned. There have been dangerous fugitives at large.

One monkey is still missing after a truck carrying the animals from the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center in New Orleans overturned on Interstate 59 in Heidelberg, Mississippi last week. In all, 21 monkeys were on the truck. Five were killed at the scene, and three escaped. Thirteen remained in the truck and were taken to their original destination, the Associated Press reports. One of the escaped monkeys was shot and killed by a woman in Jasper County, who said the monkey was seen running in her yard Sunday morning.

... Jessica Bond Ferguson said she was alerted early Sunday by her 16-year-old son who said he thought he had seen a monkey running in the yard outside their home near Heidelberg, Mississippi. She got out of bed, grabbed her firearm and her cellphone and stepped outside where she saw the monkey about 60 feet (18 meters) away. “I did what any other mother would do to protect her children,” Bond Ferguson, who has five children ranging in age from 4 to 16, told The Associated Press. “I shot at it and it just stood there, and I shot again, and he backed up and that’s when he fell.”

As much as I like the on-the-scene coverage by Mr. Haney, I’m going to leave the last word to Big Mother Maybelle.

There are some tasty local leftovers from Tuesday’s election. My favorite is that Cory Bowman, J Divan Vance’s half brother, ran for mayor of Cincinnati and took a 78–22 beating. On the first release of votes of the night, his opponent, Democratic incumbent Aftab Pureval, grabbed an 81–18 lead and never looked back. Turns out that being related to the most unlikable person outside of America’s high-security prisons is not a political boon.

For the most ridiculous response to Tuesday night, we have a tie. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is preparing his state for the flood of Manhattan plutocrats who will be moving to Seagoville rather than be ruled by Zohran Mamdani. From the Hill:

“After the polls close tomorrow night, I will impose a 100% tariff on anyone moving to Texas from NYC,” Abbott posted on social platform X.

The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for more information from NewsNation, The Hill’s sister network, on how those tariffs would work. The power to impose tariffs falls within the federal government’s authority in the Constitution, not the states.

What. A. Dope.

But Abbott has to share the House Cup with the voters in Kentucky who stormed the state’s election office on a night on which Kentucky had no elections. They wanted to vote against Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York. Michael Adams, Kentucky’s secretary of state, had to put out an all-time Xweet to address the situation.

We’re getting calls about polls being closed. They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry.

Fox News is the mind killer.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Cataplana Explorer Friedman of the Algarve brings us a tale of quids eloping with quo. Setup, from Oklahoma Watch:

On Oct. 3, [former Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Steven] Harpe posted on LinkedIn that he had accepted the position of chief product officer at LEO Technologies, an Austin, Texas-based artificial intelligence company that caters to law enforcement and corrections officials. More than 80 people, including two Board of Corrections members, responded to the post wishing Harpe congratulations. Harpe also shared news of the job change on Facebook.

Punchline:

Six months earlier, on April 3, Harpe authorized a one-year, $1.017 million deal with LEO Technologies.

To paraphrase Lamar Parmentel from The Big Easy, “Oklahoma is a marvelous environment for coincidence.”

This is your democracy. Cherish it.