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Stand Tall Wendy!

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The person I most admired in 2013 was Wendy Davis for standing up to the good ol' boys in the Texas state house and forcing them to have to reintroduce their Draconian anti-abortion bill, which was later struck down by federal courts.  Wendy is now running for governor, and making the race even more intriguing is that Leticia Van de Putte is running for lieutenant governor.  The two will have a long uphill climb, but Wendy currently enjoys much more facial recognition than the presumptive Republican nominee, Greg Abbott, who is the current attorney general, and responsible for appointing Ted Cruz as solicitor general in 2003.

Wendy is not the only one challenging entrenched Republican orthodoxy.  Alison Lundergan Grimes will be challenging Mitch McConnell this Fall, assuming he doesn't get teabagged by conservatives in his state.  Grimes gained a lot of attention in 2013 after Ashley Judd chose not to run.  Ashley was not ready for the kind of abuse she would face in an election campaign, having already gotten a bitter taste of it.  As it is, Grimes finds herself being maliciously targeted by McConnell's political director.

One hopes that both candidates will get much more support from the Democratic National Committee than Maria Buono, who essentially found herself given up for dead, politically speaking, by her own party both at the state and national level.  This was truly a low point for the DNC, which seemed to tacitly support the re-election of Chris Christie, who called a Senate special election that greatly favored the Democrats, showing that the good ol' boy network can extend across political lines.

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