Last Call

There are still a few House races left being decided at this hour, but one of them was called this afternoon:  in the newly created Arizona's 9th, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema knocked off Republican Vernon Parker to become the country's first openly bisexual member of Congress.

Former Democratic state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has been elected to represent a new Phoenix-area congressional district, emerging victorious after a bitterly fought race that featured millions of dollars in attack ads.

Sinema becomes the first openly bisexual member of Congress. Her victory came in a year when three states approved gay marriage, and at least five openly gay Democrats were elected to House seats. A Wisconsin congresswoman also became the first openly gay person elected to the Senate.

Sinema had a narrow lead on election night that made the race too close to call. But she slowly improved that advantage as more ballots were tallied in recent days, and now has a nearly 6,000-vote edge that is too much for Republican Vernon Parker to overcome.

Sinema, 36, said Monday she was “honored and ready to start working for the people of Arizona.”

It also means that out of three high-profile House races featuring black Tea Party Republicans, (Allen West, Mia Love, and Vernon Parker) all three of them lost. They were close races, but they lost nonetheless.  There's a lesson there for Republicans, and especially for black Tea Party Republicans, but I don't think they'll learn it unless it's applied with a sledgehammer.

From outer space.

Buckeye Blanked

How badly did Mitt Romney lose in East Cleveland, Ohio?  Entire precincts gave him zero votes.

The vote, incredibly, was unanimous in Obama's favor in nine Cleveland precincts.

The largest of those voted 542-0 in favor of Obama. In seven other Cleveland precincts and one in East Cleveland, Romney didn't pick up a single vote, though votes for third-party candidates stopped the president short of unanimous victories.

On Cleveland's West Side, Obama won 76 percent. And he carried 69 percent countywide.

In the suburbs, Obama won 62 percent of the vote. This was helped, in part, by winning 98 percent in both Warrensville Heights and East Cleveland, but those towns and Cleveland alone did not provide the countywide margin.

Cities where Obama won every precinct stretched from Lakewood and Brook Park to Cleveland Heights and Orange.

Meanwhile, the only citywide precinct sweeps for Romney were in Brecksville, Highland Heights and Independence, though Romney also did so in a handful of villages on the eastern side of the county. 

Entire.  Precincts, folks.  Talk about a shutout, damn.

The Hell Is Going On With This Petraeus Thing?

NY Times reporting this morning that yeah, Justice Department and the FBI knew about the Petraeus affair back in the summer, which means all of Washington knew.  So why the resignation now?

High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday.

But law enforcement officials did not notify anyone outside the F.B.I. or the Justice Department until last week because the investigation was incomplete and initial concerns about possible security breaches, which would demand more immediate action, did not appear to be justified, the officials said. 

The new accounts of the events that led to Mr. Petraeus’s sudden resignation on Friday shed light on the competing pressures facing F.B.I. agents who recognized the high stakes of any investigation involving the C.I.A. director but who were wary of exposing a private affair with no criminal or security implications. For the first time Sunday, the woman whose report of harassing e-mails led to the exposure of the affair was identified as Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla. 

So a whistleblower, an FBI/CIA turf war, and agents blabbing to everyone in DC, yet this stayed out of the papers until after the election.  For months.  As I said this morning, Eric Cantor knew in October and certainly could have fried up some Obama hate chips to serve for the last week of the campaign, but didn't.

Consider how much effort the GOP has put into trying to create a scandal out of Benghazi to try to embarrass President Obama when an actual scandal was sitting on Cantor's desk.  It has all the good stuff:  security clearances, potential blackmail, sex, a love triangle among the general, the biographer, and the whistleblower...c'mon, FOX News would have run with this for weeks.

So instead we get nothing.  There's a hell of a story here and I'd like to find out more.  Maybe Bon was right in Sunday's podcast when she said that clueless Republicans who were incompetent enough to lose this election are still just blindingly stupid and fumbled this too (as they liked Petraeus), certainly Occam's Razor bears that out, I mean we are dealing with absolute morons who think dinosaurs and man roamed the earth together like a Flintstones cartoon just a few thousands years ago, and that women secrete anti-rape shutdown hormones to prevent conception under duress.

We'll see.  New tags (since I don't have one) for DC scandals:  Someone Get Me Olivia Pope On The Line and in honor of our friends at the CIA and FBI, Intelligence Stupidity.

StupidiNews!

• GOP House majority leader Eric Cantor was informed of former CIA Director David Petraeus's affair in October through the whistleblower who exposed the security breach.
• At least a dozen are dead after an earthquake struck central Myanmar near the city of Mandalay early Monday.
• Kansas GOP Gov. Sam Brownback continues to reject implementing Obamacare's health insurance exchanges, telling the federal government Kansas will not participate.
• With Greek lawmakers approving another round of austerity cuts in a midnight session, EU leaders now must meet in order to decide on the next round of Greek bailout cash.
• Michael Arndt, the man behind the screenplays for Toy Story 3 and Little Miss Sunshine, has been tapped for the script for the next Star Wars film.