State Of Play

The speculation for who the President will nominate for running the State Department after Hillary Clinton's departure and the Pentagon after Leon Panetta leaves has begun in earnest.  WaPo:

President Obama is considering asking Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to serve as his next defense secretary, part of an extensive rearrangement of his national security team that will include a permanent replacement for former CIA director David H. Petraeus.

Although Kerry is thought to covet the job of secretary of state, senior administration officials familiar with the transition planning said that nomination will almost certainly go to Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

That of course means Scott Brown will get another crack at the Senate, this time to fill Kerry's seat.  Fun.  Republicans are already talking about sinking both nominations, too.

Rice, one of an inner circle of aides who have been with Obama since his first presidential campaign in 2007, is under particular fire over the Benghazi incident, in which U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested that she was part of what they suspect was an initial election-related attempt to portray the attack as a peaceful demonstration that turned violent, rather than what the administration now acknowledges was an organized terrorist assault.

Rice’s description, days after the attack, of a protest gone wrong indicated that she either intentionally misled the country or was ­incompetent, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said Sunday. Rice, he said, “would have an in­cred­ibly difficult time” winning Senate confirmation as secretary of state.

Kerry too would face a tough road to the Pentagon.

The idea of Kerry heading up DoD was also questioned by Republicans, who warned the selection of the Vietnam veteran-turned-critic wouldn't be simple either.

"He'll run into a buzz saw of Vietnam vets" if Obama taps Kerry for the pentagon slot, a GOP aide said.

A Senate GOP foreign policy aide predicted that ultimately both could be confirmed, but not without a protracted and ugly confirmation fight for the White House — a difficult way to start off a second term.

Let's be honest here, Republicans are going to make a protracted, bruising fight over anyone the President nominates.  So when I hear nonsense like this:

There has even been speculation in foreign-policy circles that the messy departure of Mr. Petraeus might prod Mr. Obama to consider nominating a Republican, like former Senator Chuck Hagel; a hawkish independent, like Senator Joseph I. Lieberman; or even Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who was Mr. Obama’s envoy to Beijing before running for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Huntsman dismissed the rumors of his candidacy as “idle hallway gossip.” 

It makes me want to punch people in the face.  If President Barack Obama nominated Joe F'ckin Lieberman for any cabinet position, I'd sign up for GOP black outreach programs immediately and I'm pretty sure all of you would disown me as a result.  I would hope the President would stand up for himself more then that and I dismiss this beltway idiocy out of hand.

Stick with Rice and Kerry and trust in the party, Mr. President.

StupidiNews!

• The probe into former CIA Director David Petraeus has now extended to current Middle East theater commander Gen. John Allen, who has also sent inappropriate emails to a woman linked to the Petraeus scandal.
• A second Massachusetts compounding pharmacy is now said to be involved in an outbreak of deadly fungal meningitis in medicine.
• As the battle over the Syrian border town of Ras al Ayn enters its 5th day, thousands of Syrian refugees continue to flee into Turkey.
• European finance ministers have given Greece until 2016 to get their deficits in line with the rest of the EU.
• McAfee Security founder John McAfee is now wanted for murder in Belize, where he left the US for 20 years ago to avoid a lawsuit.

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.

Last Call

Just wanted to wish all our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines out there who served a happy Veteran's Day as we remember those who gave to their country, and those who gave all.

Godspeed.

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.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

As usual, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

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.