Podcast Versus The Stupid!

Episode 20 is up, Aftermath Of The Math, in which Bon and I cover the Republican freakout over the lost election, which pollsters were correct and which lost what little credibility they had left, as well as the surprise resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an affair with his biographer, SCOTUS versus Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s plea bargain deal.

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Republican Pollsters Know Why They Lost

Alex Burns reviews the political epitaph for GOP pollsters filled with apparent dopes who "didn't see it coming", who "didn't think the electorate would vote" for Obama or at all, and "can't figure out what happened."

Let me clear this up.  Republican pollsters knew exactly why they lost.

The crux of the party’s challenge in 2012, said Republican pollster David Winston, was figuring out whether the electorate would look more like the 2004 voting population, when Republicans and Democrats turned out in equal numbers, or the 2008 electorate, which was more Democratic than Republican by 7 points.

Winston questioned how rigorously some campaigns tested their assumptions about who would show up.

“The results fell within the 2004 result and the 2008 result, obviously closer to 2008,” said Winston, who advises the House GOP leaders — who fared well on Tuesday. “That was clearly how everybody had been describing what the potential range was. The question is, as people were assessing their individual campaigns, whether it be the presidential or down ballot for that, was how were they working through the potential scenarios as far as what could happen.”

One top GOP pollster expressed dismay at the ultimate composition of the electorate: “I had no expectation that Democratic advantage on party ID would be the same as it was in 2008. I thought there would be more Democrats than Republicans, but I didn’t think it would be equal to 2008."

Bull.  They knew it was over after the Democratic National Convention.  But unless the race was close, no more polling.  Hence the insanity that Romney had tied the race or even taken the lead after the first debate.  We had to have the horse race mentality so the pollsters would keep getting paid to poll.

This race was never close.  Keep that in mind that they told you it was anyway.

Last Call

The "We love America, why do you hippies hate it" right has decided that the real problem is...America.  Specifically, the America who voted for Barack Obama a second time, and therefore are no longer worthy of being saved by the infinite wisdom of the right, who this weekend has decided to wash their hands of the whole matter and want to burn the whole thing down.  Take Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO:

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

Or his compatriot, Mark Steyn:

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

Gosh, it's almost like these guys are rooting for America to fail.  Some contrition from Tuesday night, right?

Collective Punishment, Ohio Republican Style

Ohio was the state that put President Obama over the top Tuesday night as record numbers of minority voters and women turned out in the President's favor.  The response from Ohio Republicans?  It's time to immediately punish the people of the state for allowing this to happen.  Time to punish working class voters:

For the chairman and chief executive of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, the reelection of President Obama was no cause for celebration. It was a time for prayer – and layoffs.

Robert E. Murray read a prayer to a group of company staff members on the day after the election, lamenting the direction of the country and asking: “Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.”

On Wednesday, Murray also laid off 54 people at American Coal, one of his subsidiary companies, and 102 at Utah American Energy, blaming a “war on coal” by the administration of President Barack Obama.”

...and time to punish women:

Last year, anti-choice advocates in Ohio pushed extreme legislation to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which often occurs as early as six weeks, before many women may even know they’re pregnant. So-called “heartbeat” bills like HB 125 are so radical that they often divide the anti-abortion community, and this particular legislation has been stalled in the Ohio Senate since June 2011.

But now, thanks to significant pressure from the anti-choice groups who were the biggest proponents of the heartbeat bill last year, HB 125 may be up again for consideration in Ohio’s Senate as early as next week. 

The bill would functionally eliminate abortion in the state and makes no exception for the health of the mother, rape, or incest.  And this too:

The heartbeat bill isn’t the only anti-choice measure up for consideration in Ohio next week. A Planned Parenthood affiliate in Ohio notes that the Ohio House Health Committee has also scheduled a vote next week on a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. 

And so the "payback" begins.   That's how Republicans in Ohio seek "compromise".  You get punished, and they tell you it's for your own good.  They want you to hate Obama, it's all his fault we have to do this to you, they say.

No contrition, no remorse, no soul-searching.  Not for a second.  You are the enemy to them, and you will now pay as a result.

Last Call

Team Romney lost for two big reasons.  One, they bought into the bubble.

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks - not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan - bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time - poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats - and that would translate into votes for Romney.

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed - they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

Those assumptions drove their campaign strategy: their internal polling showed them leading in key states, so they decided to make a play for a broad victory: go to places like Pennsylvania while also playing it safe in the last two weeks. 

They actually thought they were going to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, maybe even Michigan.  They thought Florida, Colorado and Ohio were in the bag as a result.  They bought into the bubble and it cost them everything.

Secondly, their ground game was horrible, as BooMan points out.

After reading a variety of articles with sources from inside the Romney campaign team, I am considering revising my whole way of looking at this election. I knew, because I witnessed it first hand, that Romney had a terrible ground game that basically threw money at problems rather than organizing in any rational way. But I still can't believe that they just wasted 30,000 volunteers on election day by asking them to sit inside precincts and strike voters off the list as they voted using a web application that didn't work. Failure on that level is reminiscent of the post-invasion plan for Iraq. It's not a matter of the Obama campaign staff being better. The Romney campaign sabotaged their most passionate warriors and rendered them useless. 

If there's one word that sums up the Romney disaster, it is "entitled".  They thought they were entitled to win, they were entitled to the Presidency, they were entitled to the vote, they were entitled to fawning media coverage, they were entitled to coattails that would make then GOP heroes, entitled to victory, because they were who they thought they were.

Mitt Romney never had to work for anything in his life.  It was given to him.  That sense of entitlement sabotaged his campaign from the very beginning.  The notion that anyone would every question his victory simply never occurred to the man, because he was never questioned before.  He just came out on top because that's the way the world worked for people like Mitt Romney.  They won because they were the winners.  Only losers ever considered losing, and those rules of gravity just didn't apply to Mitt.  He was the destined one. Dubya, for all his faults, at least had been tempered by his humility and his battle with alcoholism.  Not Mitt.

And that attitude swept down the campaign.  Only losers prepare to lose.  Only losers make "corrections" and "adjustments".  Mitt had already won the election, it was all just a giant set of bureaucratic trivialities that had to be weathered before the White House was theirs.  This was Mitt's test.  Ann Romney, especially, displayed this attitude of "why don't you people treat him as the President he is?"  They had been running victory laps since May.  The first debate convinced them they had won completely and utterly.  You could see it.  They had "visualized victory."

Only, something funny happened on the way to the Oval Office.  Reality stepped in and slapped the bejeezus out of these entitled pricks as the country revolted against these assholes.  Barely.  But it happened.

And it's a damn good thing.  Could you imagine these clueless, entitled bastards running the country?  They would have made Dubya look like a Boy Scout.

That's terrifying.

Pop Goes The Bubble Cause The Bubble Goes Pop

Rachel Maddow sums up the madness of the right this week and rips into the know-nothings of the GOP.



It's a necessary dose of tough love.

But Obama really won, Maddow said. “And he really was born in Hawaii, and he really is legitimately President of the United States, again, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month, and the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy, and the polls were not screwed to oversample Democrats, and Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad, Nate Silver was doing math, and climate change is real, and rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes, and evolution is a thing, and Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us, and nobody is taking away anyone’s guns, and taxes have not gone up, and the deficit is dropping, actually, and saddam hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and the moon landing was real, and FEMA is not building concentration camps, and you UN election observers are not taking over Texas, and moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”

Maddow pleaded with Republicans to accept the “actual, lived truth of the world” instead of believing whatever made them feel good. The liberal MSNBC host said it was important for the country to have a two-party system where both parties had good, albeit different, ideas on how to manage the government.

“You guys, we’re counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently.”

There's zero reason to believe Republicans will snap out of it, and every reason to believe they will obstruct the country's recovery in order to spite the President and damage the Democrats, continue to believe in insanity,  continue to insult the American people and continue to try to drive that wedge between the members of the President's coalition.  Obama Derangement Syndrome will only get worse, not better.

But I do thank Rachel for trying.

Galt's Ghosts

And so, it begins, as American class warfare finds the "job creators" deciding they are going to take their petty revenge on those awful, greedy, moocher minorities.

“I’ve done my share of educating my employees. I never tell them which way to vote. I believe in the free system we have, I believe in the right to choose who they want to be president, but I did explain as a business owner that I have always put my employees first. I always made sure that when I went without a paycheck that [I] made sure they were paid. And I explained that I always put them first and unfortunately I’m at a point where I’m being forced to have to worry about me and my family now and a business that I built from just me to 114 employees.

“I explained to them a month ago that if Obama gets in office that the regulations for Obamacare are gonna hurt our business, and I’m gonna have to make provisions to make sure I have enough money to cover the payroll taxes, the additional health care I’m gonna have to do, and I explained that to them and I said you do what you feel like in your heart you need to do, but I’m just letting you know as a warning this is things I have to think of as a business owner.

“Well unfortunately, and most of my employees are Hispanic — I’m not gonna go into what kind of company I have, but I have mostly Hispanic employees — well unfortunately we know what happened and I can’t wait around anymore, I have to be proactive. I had to lay off 22 people today to make sure that my business is gonna thrive and I’m gonna be around for years to come. I have to build up that nest egg now for the taxes and regulations that are coming my way. Elections do have consequences, but so do choices. A choice you make every day has consequences and you know what, I’ve always put my employees first, but unfortunately today I have to put me and my family first, and you watch what’s gonna happen. I’m just one guy with 114 employees — well was 114 employees — watch what happens in the next six months. The Dow alone lost 314 points today. There’s a tsunami coming and if you didn’t think this election had consequences, just wait.”

"Just wait" as the mighty decide they will punish us, to teach you people a lesson, to teach you people to know your goddamn place in the world.  Class warfare has reached the open "warfare" point now.  If they fire enough of us, I guess we'll all just die or something.

But don't you dare think of businessmen as the bad guys around here.

StupidiNews!

• Jared Lee Loughner, the man who killed six and wounded 12 others in his attempt to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011, received seven consecutive life sentences plus 140 years on Thursday.
• Parts of New York City and neighboring New Jersey are rationing gasoline as shortages from Hurricane Sandy and this week's nor'easter continue to wreak havoc.
• As China's once-a-decade government reshuffling begins this week, President Hu Jintao is warning that government corruption is the largest threat to China's government system.
• President Obama's victory is prompting the wealthiest Americans to make a number of tax-saving financial moves before the January 1 "fiscal cliff".
• After years of planning, Australia has now formally dropped its plans to filter the country's access to the internet, calling it unworkable.

Last Call

I'd like to personally thank Ohio GOP Secretary of State Jon Husted for giving Ohio to Obama and Sherrod Brown on Tuesday.

Multiple Romney sources buzzed about one number in particular: 15 percent. According to exit polls, that’s the share of African-Americans who voted in Ohio this year. In 2008, the black percentage of the electorate was 11 percent. In Virginia and Florida, exit polls showed the same share of African-Americans turned out as four years ago, something that GOP turnout models did not anticipate.

“We didn’t think they’d turn out more of their base vote than they did in 2008, but they smoked us,” said one Romney operative. “It’s unbelievable that that they turned out more from the African-American community than in 2008. Somehow they got ‘em to vote.”

African-Americans supported Obama nearly universally, but Obama still only won Ohio by 1.9 percent.

“We just didn’t see the enthusiasm with their base,” he added. “We had enthusiasm on our side. So we thought, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna win this.’ … We hit our numbers in rural areas. When Fox called it, we still thought we had a chance based on what we could figure was in and what was still out.”

As Dennis G says over at the Juice:

Mitt and the Wingnuts have run a four-year campaign that is only a blond hair’s width away from calling the President a n*gger every single day. They are focused like a laser beam on promoting white rage and using every dog whistle they can think of to get the message across. White folks heard them and so did people of color. Team Mitt is surprised that African-American turnout increased over 2008, but that is only because they are incapable of thinking of these folks as people.

Dennis is purely correct, but there's more to it.  On top of that the aforementioned Jon Husted made a personal effort to specifically screw over black voters by limiting early voting for no other reason than to specifically screw over black voters.   He made no effort to hide it.  He made no effort to disguise the fact he was targeting early voting on weekends, and on Sundays especially to go after the Souls to the Polls effort in Ohio where black churches were organizing to get people to vote early.  Then, when a judge forced him to have early voting on Sundays, Husted then limited the hours on Sunday specifically to take place after churches had let out by delaying the start of Sunday early voting until 1 PM in order to do as much damage to the effort by black churches to get out the vote as he possibly could.

And you know what?  Black people figured that out.  It was deliberate targeting and then in response, black voters turned out in record numbers and gave the state to Obama as a giant SCREW YOU to Republicans.  We're used to the efforts to ping the ni-CLANG on the President.  But Husted made it personal and deliberate not to go after Obama, but to go after African-American voters in Ohio.

You go after us, we come back after you.  As a result, record turnout.  Voting was indeed the best revenge.

If the Romney crew didn't see this coming as a result of Husted's months-long, national news-making effort to disenfranchise black voters, they're even more incompetent than I thought.

Asian-Adjacent

One of the big reasons why Romney and the Republicans lost was because they performed as badly as Republicans did among minority voters in 2008...and in many cases, fared far worse.  Romney got only 5% of the African American vote, and did far worse among Latino voters than expected:  President Obama's expected 67% share of that vote turned into 75%.

But the most interesting demographic:  President Obama and the Democrats picked up nearly 75% of the Asian American vote too.

President Barack Obama enjoyed soaring support from Asian Americans to win another term, a survey said Wednesday, as voters elected new faces to Congress including its first Hindu lawmaker.

A poll conducted for community groups found that 73 percent of Asian Americans voted for Obama on Tuesday, a gain from the two-thirds support he won in 2008 and part of a major shift toward the Democrats over the past 20 years.

While small in total, Asian Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the United States and made up 3.4 percent of the electorate on Tuesday, up from 2.7 percent four years ago.

What issues are important?  The economy, and surprisingly, Obamacare.

The survey — whose finding on Asian American support for Obama was similar to polls carried out for media outlets — said that the top issue for the community was the economy.

In one potential reason behind support for Obama, Asian Americans were supportive of his signature legislative achievement, with 60 percent saying that the government had a role to play in ensuring access to health care.

Tuesday also meant the first practicing Hindu member of Congress was elected as well.

At least five Americans of Asian or Pacific Island descent, all Democrats, won new seats in Congress. In Hawaii, 31-year-old Tulsi Gabbard was elected as the first Hindu member of Congress.

Gabbard, who served in combat in Iraq, is of Samoan descent and her mother embraced the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition.

“That Gabbard won while proudly espousing her Hinduism and voicing a willingness to be a strong voice for Hindu Americans brings over two million Americans into the political landscape for the first time,” said Aseem Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation.

Mazie Hirono, who held the seat which Gabbard won, was elected to the Senate. She will be the first senator who is Buddhist and the first who was born in Japan.

The Democrats' minority-majority coalition marches on, and it cost the GOP big.  America the melting pot has never been more true.  Time for the GOP to adapt or perish politically.  New tag as America forges ahead:  The New Minority Majority.

Meanwhile, In Evil Mirror Universe...

Taegan Goddard grabbed some screenies of the Romney transition team website pages, in case he won.




And remember, in an unknown number of evil, awful alternate realities out there, this is happening right now.

You prevented this, America.  I like you a lot now.

StupidiNews!

• New York and New Jersey residents trying to come back from Hurricane Sandy are now dealing with a new nor'easter expected to dump snow from Maryland to Maine.
• Canadian officials are confident that President Obama will now approve the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline through the Midwest.
• The man behind the controversial anti-Muslim film that sparked riots and attacks against US compounds in the Middle East has received a year in prison for probation violations.
• Greece has passed the latest round of austerity measures necessary for a new round of EU bailout funding despite fresh general strikes and protests across the country.
• California's controversial Proposition 35 approved by 81% of voters Tuesday, banning anonymous internet usage by registered sex offenders, has been blocked by a federal judge based on First Amendment grounds.

Last Call

Podcast Versus The Stupid Ep. 19:  Four More Years!  Bon and I cover the election results from Tuesday night, the big races, and the major ballot initiatives, plus we discuss the future of ZVTS and what we plan to do with some well-deserved time off.

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Lesson Unlearned

If you thought the right would be all "Well, you guys won this round, so let's get the country fixed" then you really, really have not been paying attention these last 12 years.

We’ve seen an important (though far from decisive) battle in the slow-motion civil war the nation is undergoing: The blue states want to secede not from America but from Americanism. They reject the American republic of God-fearing individuals in favor of the European ideal, which has only been government by aristocracy: either an aristocracy of birth or, nowadays, of ruling know-it-alls — of post-religious, globalist intellectuals (a.k.a. PORGIs). As I’ve said before — many others have too — you can’t graduate class after class after class of left-indoctrinated ignoramuses without paying the price.  Last night was a down payment.

But we’ve won civil wars and preserved the Union before. We’ll do it again — if we face up to the fact that we need to replace our schools and colleges now; the grace period has lasted a generation, but it’s over. I know we can do it and I’m pretty sure we will do it. Americanism is too strong and brilliant and young to die.

To recap, the day after the election, National Review's David Gelernter is not only declaring that the majority of Americans have seceded from "real" America, he is openly advocating a civil war to get that part of America back. 

Forget pretending to be civil while sharpening the long knives.  These guys are now openly vowing they will destroy the country in order to save it, and we're all collateral damage.

Welcome to Obama's second term.  In honor, a new tag:  The Second Civil War.

Bon Goes On Walkabout

Another election is behind us, and I want to thank everyone for reading, caring what is going on in this crazy little world, and sharing your thoughts.  We went through it together, by golly.

I'm taking a little break, a walkabout if you are a Crocodile Dundee fan.  I won't be gone long, and will surely have some fun things to talk about when I get back.  It may be as little as two weeks, it could be as long as a month.  But I will return, and in the meantime I will be on podcasts and lurking.

Anyone who would like to reach me or read more about my Walkabout can do so through my site.  With rare exception, all November appearances are canceled, but I will pick back up December 1.

Have fun.  Be good.  Save awesome kitty pictures for my triumphant return.