• Mexican Cartel Bought Guns From Border Patrol
  
• How Redistricting Could Keep The House Red For A Decade
  
• Obama To Speak On Fiscal Cliff
  
• Russia Reminds Obama Of His Missile Defense Promise
  
• Are You Ready For Another Bush?
  
• Republican Party Begins Election Review Of What Went Wrong
  
• For Romney's Digital Campaign, A Second Place Finish
  
• The Evanescense Of Majorities
  
• Occupy The Media
  
• Post Election Layoffs Have Begun
  
• The Next Four Years Won't Be As Good As The Last
  
• There Really Is No Difference Between NBC And MSNBC
  
• Rubio Heads To Iowa
  
• Romney Was Shell-Shocked On Election Night
  
• Argentina's President Rocked By Biggest Protest In A Decade
  
• Utah Company Lays Off 100 And Blames Obama
  

Special article: The Entire GOP Elite Seems To Be Selling Out En masse On Immigration. Boehner, Sean Hannity, Cantor, Krauthammer, etc. We cannot allow this to happen. How does it make sense to legalize a group of people who voted overwhelmingly Democrat? Do you want to make Texas a swing state? An amnesty program would be the end of the Republican party as we know it. How naive are these people? Does Sean Hannity think we'll get credit for the amnesty? Did we get credit for the 1986 amnesty or did the Democrats?

I'm all for a path to citizenship through legal channels. I'm not for granting blanket amnesty to people here illegally. I know people on our side are going to claim people like me are overreacting and that there isn't a deal on the table. Great, you trust the same people who put forth comprehensive immigration reform. I'm not. You trust that the Democrats will negotiate in good faith. I'm not.

We lost an election on Tuesday by a little more than 2 million votes. We weren't blown out. We don't need to capitulate on everything. What did the Democrats do after they lost to Bush in 2004? Remember when they helped him push through social security reform? Me neither.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:13 AM | Comments (920)
Post contains 337 words, total size 4 kb.

ICYMI, be sure to read John E.'s post on Project Orca from yesterday. It's being linked and retweeted by practically everyone on the Internets.

Breitbart.com has more information on this clusterf***.

Posted by: andy at 02:39 AM | Comments (520)
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.

Back when I supported Tim Pawlenty -- do you remember him? -- I was trying to think of ways to generate some excitement for him.

I mentioned this to John Sexton (@verumserum, now at Breitbart), and he did this video, which we never finished. There was a lot of creative tension on the set.

Later we tried to get it all recut for Romney but there were technical snags.

Anyway. This video has now been sitting around for six months, unfinished. Might as well post it. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 PM | Comments (235)
Post contains 208 words, total size 1 kb.

Fatigue and a bad internet connection conspire to make this ONT paltry artistically minimalist.

21 Ways That Rich People Think Differently From the Poor

Average people think MONEY is the root of all evil. Rich people believe POVERTY is the root of all evil.

"The average person has been brainwashed to believe rich people are lucky or dishonest," Siebold writes.

That's why there's a certain shame that comes along with "getting rich" in lower-income communities.

"The world class knows that while having money doesn't guarantee happiness, it does make your life easier and more enjoyable."

From Steve Siebold, author of "How Rich People Think."

And the 2012 Election Popular Vote by County

Pretty much what we've gotten used to seeing  - a sea of red and then the blue cities. Thanks to the genghis.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:44 PM | Comments (742)
Post contains 493 words, total size 8 kb.

RULE #1
EVERY TIME THE WHITE HOUSE HAS FLIPPED, THE WINNING PARTY SNAGS A STATE IT FAILED TO GRAB THE LAST TIME THEY FLIPPED IT. Those states may have been new to the union, or the demographics simply changed, which is the case since the 1960's. But the winning party in a flip always, without fail, gains states.

Republicans' first flip from the Democrats: 1860
Democrats' first flip from the Republicans: 1884

White House Flips since 1884:
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1888 back to R: NE,CO,KS
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1892 back to D: CA,WI,IL
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1896 back to R: ND,KY,WV,MD,DE,NJ,CT
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1912 back to D: OR,NV,AZ,NM,OK,CO,ID,MT,WY,ND,IA,OH,ME,MA,RI,NH
1920 back to R: MO,TN,OK,KS,NE,SD,MT,ID,WY,UT,CO,NV,AZ,NM,WA
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1932 back to D: WA,UT,MN,CA,SD
1952 back to R: FL,TX,VA
1960 back to D: PA,DE,CT,HI
1968 back to R: NC,SC,AK
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1976 back to D: WI,OH,KY,TN,FL
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1980 back to R: WA,MI,TX,PA,NY,CT,MA,ME
INCUMBENT DEFEATED* 1992 back to D: MT,WA,OR,NV,CA,CO,NM,IA,IL,MI,NJ,CT,VT,NH,ME
2000 back to R: WV,GA
2008 back to D: IN,NC,FL,VA,NE2

Note: this rule holds before the 1860s, but parties and party status changed from 1796 thru 1856, so we are focusing on the last 150 years with the modern parties.

When it was clear not a single Gore state was breaking Romney's way on Tuesday night, it was as clear an indicator as the nasty numbers in Virginia and Florida.
So memorize the map below, and unless the R candidate is ahead or even slightly favored in one of these, stock up on whiskey for another nasty November night:

Posted by: CAC at 05:48 PM | Comments (200)
Post contains 262 words, total size 2 kb.

Offered without comment from today.

John Boehner

Boehner offered optimism that his party could come to an agreement with Obama on immigration, a subject that has hurt the GOP with Hispanic voters.

"This issue has been around far too long," Boehner said in the ABC interview. "A comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I'm confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all."

Charles Krauthammer

There is one exception here, which I think is Hispanics. And that is not an intrinsic ethnic affinity problem, it is a policy problem. The Republicans are -- Romney ran right of Rick Perry in the primaries on that issue. He never recovered.

I think Republicans can change their position, be a lot more open to actual amnesty with enforcement. Amnesty, everything short of citizenship. And to make a bold change in their policy. Enforcement and then immediately after, a guarantee of amnesty. That would change everything. If you had a Rubio arguing that it would completely up-end all the ethnic alignments.

Sean Hannity

“It’s simple to me to fix it,” Hannity said. “I think you control the border first. You create a pathway for those people that are here — you don’t say you’ve got to go home. And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because, you know what, it’s got to be resolved. The majority of people here, if some people have criminal records you can send them home, but if people are here, law-abiding, participating for years, their kids are born here, you know, first secure the border, pathway to citizenship, done.”

“You can’t let the problem continue — it’s got to stop,” the conservative radio host added

Added: Chuck Schumer

This is a breakthrough to have the Speaker endorse the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:27 PM | Comments (710)
Post contains 324 words, total size 3 kb.

But the fired employees will still have full access to affordable tampons.

Plus Closing Up For The Night Open Thread. I can't look at this computer anymore.

Oh before I go, you'll never believe this. Ed Shultz said something stupid and embarrassing and blowhard-y.

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (361)
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

I've repeatedly quoted this Larry Sabato analysis, back from early June.

The data in Table 1 show that compared with voters supporting a candidate, swing voters were disproportionately white and female. They were also much more likely to describe themselves as completely independent and much less likely to describe themselves as Democrats or independents leaning toward the Democratic Party. But the most dramatic differences between swing voters and voters supporting a candidate involved their opinions about President Obama and their enthusiasm about voting in 2012.

Swing voters had much more negative opinions of President ObamaÂ’s job performance than other voters. In fact, their opinions were almost as negative as those of Romney supporters. Only 11% of swing voters approved of ObamaÂ’s job performance compared with 6% of Romney voters. In contrast, 92% of Obama voters approved of the presidentÂ’s job performance.

But while swing voters were similar to Romney voters in their evaluation of President ObamaÂ’s job performance, they were much less enthusiastic about voting. Only 19% of swing voters described themselves as extremely or very enthusiastic about voting in 2012 compared with 47% of Romney supporters and 50% of Obama supporters. And 58% of swing voters described themselves as not too enthusiastic or not at all enthusiastic about voting compared with only 27% of Romney supporters and 21% of Obama supporters.

I wrote, sort of obviously:

Obama, in fact, may be hoping for a rather low turnout election -- or at least a low turnout among these voters. His base, as ever, he wants to greatly turnout. But these voters -- he'd prefer keeping them bored and on the fence and not bothered with voting.

That's exactly what he did. For lower-income male and female white voters both, he ran a series of ads slamming Romney as a heartless Plutocrat who wants to take their jobs and give them cancer. For female white voters in particular, he ginned up a "War on Women."

For both of these attacks, the Republicans armed Obama with mighty knives-- Romney offered up his infamous 47% quote. Akin and Mourdock told women that if they were raped, they'd make sure the law required them to carry the rapist's child to term.

But this was Obama's plan from the start: Drive people away from the polls. Specifically, the large number of people who were disatisfied with him but who weren't sold on Romney.

And he did get them to sit this one out.

First of all, the figures we have so far... suggest to me that the story of this election is not massive turnout of the Democratic base but exceptionally depressed turnout of a portion of the electorate that, when it votes, tends to vote Republican. Those were after all the two parts of President Obama’s cynical and substance-free campaign strategy: to work the most intensely committed and reliable parts of his base into a frenzy while persuading the least committed and reliable part of the Republican base (white working-class voters) that Mitt Romney didn’t deserve their support so they should just sit it out. Much of the post-election analysis has focused on the sophistication of the former effort—finding every last tiny niche in the patchwork of clamoring interest groups that makes up the Democratic coalition and telling it exactly what it wanted to hear. But the election returns suggest the latter effort—using any low and mendacious tactic required to tell working-class voters (especially white, Midwestern ones) that Mitt Romney was an evil and uncaring plutocrat—was by far the more successful and important. Those voters were not going to support Obama, but they could be kept away from Romney, and evidently they were.



The full crosstabs of exit polls are not available yet (or at least not to me), but the information we do have allows for a fairly clear picture of this. As Sean Trende points out today, the lower turnout in this election was driven almost entirely by lower turnout among such voters. “The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator,” he notes, “it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator.”




This is both bad news and good news: It means Republicans are indeed vulnerable to attacks that paint them as plutocrats, but it also means that the demographics of the electorate have not turned decisively against them. The voters that could carry Republicans to victory are there, but far too many of them did not vote this time.

I think it's mostly bad news. We call Obama's strategy cynical, and it was. But it was more than that: It promoted cynicism.

He wanted voters to think that "The System" was a rigged game, and that their situation was hopeless, and that there was therefore, no point in voting.

He accomplished just that.

Many voters have dropped out of the voter pool over the years as they've decided that government just doesn't matter, that nothing can change, that it's all a corrupt game.

Obama -- the candidate of Hope and Change, the putative Lightworker -- actively worked to convince ten million Americans of that, and convince them to give up their civic duty and hard-won right to cast a vote in self-government.

Posted by: Ace at 03:16 PM | Comments (221)
Post contains 916 words, total size 6 kb.

As the returns began pouring in, my volunteers engaged in the thankless task of racking up the numbers. I had some delay at first in getting them in, as it was a busy night, and started to watch the numbers coming from Ohio, Florida, and Virginia.

To say I was upset was a tremendous understatement. Frankly, I lost the will to keep reporting once it was painfully obvious Obama had won Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Colorado. I held off for a bit, then hit the edit feature to put in "Obama wins", and after my network connection crashed, called it a frustrated night. I will update the site stats from my volunteers gathered info. Kudos as well to them, who are still humming along in a Decision Desk email chain with suggestions and reflections on the race and campaigns. We will do this again for '14, hopefully with happier news.

I want to thank all of them for continuing to report, as tough as it was.

I have some thoughts on how polling and data-mining can be used by the GOP, the lessons not learned from the incredibly successful fight against the recall in Wisconsin, and I'll throw them together for a post in the next week or so.

If I had known Team Romney wasn't replicating that June effort from the Badger state, I would have called this race months ago. I had perhaps blind faith that their team knew what it was doing, that it had learned from Obama's GOTV efforts and was ready to match them. As we are learning about ORCA, that was horribly wrong. From now on, the polling reigns supreme. Right in 2008, right in 2012, right in the Recall. Goodbye "unskewed" silliness.

Since polling has all but evaporated post election, I think I'm going to enjoy some stargazing. Dinner with the wife. Definitely going to take time to enjoy some art for a while. Something that will take some of the sting out of Tuesday. Something less discomforting and awkward than the massive fuck-up that was the Romney campaign. So look forward to my next art thread: Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio at LACMA.

I wish I was kidding.

Posted by: CAC at 02:25 PM | Comments (329)
Post contains 389 words, total size 2 kb.

His other joke is that Obama's been "working the body" of the world's problems for the last four years, and is finally ready to unleash his devastating haymaker.

Um, just so you know: While Obamabots might say this seriously, Carolla's saying it with bitter irony. He is making fun of the fact that this guy's had four years to solve the problems he now says he's all ready to start working on.

He rants about the election in the beginning of yesterday's show.

Worth a listen. He also knocks Elizabeth Warren a bunch.

He voted Republican, straight Republican, for the first time in his life. So that's something.

Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (190)
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.