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Month: November 2012

Rove’s meltdown

Rove’s meltdown

by digby

Enjoy:

Yes, most of the outstanding votes were in Obama strongholds, but old Karl didn’t want to see it called until the partisan election apparatus had a chance to “check” them. You know, make sure they were all “legal,” Unfortunately, the Democratic win was just a little bit to big for them challenge it. Very disappointing.  They’d worked so hard to make sure that didn’t happen.

But lest we get too giddy, I’m going to let Tom Tomorrow (from 2008) give the unpopular, necessary caution about all this:

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Vaginal Americans delivered

Vaginal Americans delivered

by digby

In all the sturm und drang in the media this morning about the Republicans’ inability to attract anyone but white people, I’m not hearing a whole lot about this:

In total, the gender gap on Tuesday added up to 18 percent — a significantly wider margin than the 12-point gender gap in the 2008 election.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that waging a campaign against contraception was probably a bad idea. Calling women who use contraception a bunch of “sluts” was even worse. Insisting that women bear their rapists children was just the last straw.

Many people said this was a silly distraction, unworthy of a national discussion when there are so many “important” issues to decide. But for individual American women, this was a highly personal insult — a major political Party was treating them with a level of disdain so profound that they had to assume that something very serious was afoot.

And it was. The GOP takeover in 2010 was a preview of an extreme anti-woman agenda that could no longer be ignored. As many of their male allies seemed flummoxed, women all over the country fought back publicly. They voted in very large numbers. And a whole bunch of Democratic women won their races.

Word to the wise:

photo: Don’t fuck with me, fellas!

The Impeachment of Barack Obama by tristero

The Impeachment of Barack Obama

by tristero

Let’s not kid ourselves. Republican operatives went to bed last night only after they finalized plans to ruin Obama’s second term. And they will stop at nothing.

The struggle to turn the United States into a rightwing dystopia has not ended. And it will not end until the people who are currently at the center of the Republican party get driven back to the margins of acceptable discourse.

Which is where they belong.

UPDATE: This post currently has the headline: Question for the Victor: How Far Do You Push? Already the media is urging conciliation with the snarling right. It simply will not happen.

They picked the wrong guy — and what comes next

They picked the wrong guy — and what comes next

by digby

I’m sure there is a lot of soul-searching and rending of garments in Republican circles this morning, asking “how could this have happened?” Obviously, there are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they have been acting like barbarians for the past four years and all the non-tea drinking normal people finally put their collective foot down. Being the party of racists, sexists  and greedy plutocrats in a country with a non-white, female, middle and working class majority may not be the smartest electoral strategy.

But there was one other important factor that I honestly believe cannot be overstated. This excerpt from the American Conservative on how to explain the loss to your right wing friends makes it clear:

You didn’t like Romney that much either. So are you really surprised? The entire Republican primary was a search for a “Not-Romney” candidate. In fact, you probably once contemplated voting for Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, or Rick Santorum precisely because Romney was a flip-flopper who invented Obamacare in Massachusetts. Just a year ago, my dear conservative friend, you were likely very much against the idea of Romney being your nominee. So how can you be surprised that other Americans never warmed to him as a choice for president?

They picked the single worst candidate they could have chosen: a man who exemplifies the word “boss.” The bad kind. As much as people rail against their taxes and the abstract idea of deficits and big government, in an economy like this many working people face a very real, immediate form of authoritarianism every single day when they go to work. And Mitt is the poster boy for the misery that a buyer’s employment market brings to the average worker. The Obama campaign and its surrogates understood that and defined Romney early on as the Man From Bain. It was very, very smart.

And the rank and file of the Party — people who also didn’t much care for Mitt — are laying the blame directly at the feet of  the party establishment:

The Tea Party Patriots declared war on the Republican establishment after moderate establishment Republican Mitt Romney’s loss to President Barack Obama on Tuesday.
Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, criticized the Republican Party for hand-picking a Beltway elite candidate who did not campaign forcefully on America’s founding principles and said the “presidential loss is unequivocally on them.”

“For those of us who believe that America, as founded, is the greatest country in the history of the world – a ‘Shining city upon a hill’ – we wanted someone who would fight for us,” Martin said. “We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America’s founding principles, who inspired millions of independents and ‘Reagan Democrats’ to join us, and who fought his leftist opponents on the idea that America, as founded, was a ‘Shining city upon a hill.’

Instead, Martin lamented, “what we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party.”
“While it might take longer to restore America’s founding principles with President Obama back in office, we are not going away,” Martin said. “With the catastrophic loss of the Republican elite’s hand-picked candidate – the tea party is the last best hope America has to restore America’s founding principles.”

Martin said the Tea Party’s “work begins again today” and “we will turn our attention back to Congress, to fight the battles that lie ahead including balancing the budget, repealing Obamacare, cutting the debt, holding the line on the debt ceiling, and the many other issues that will arise to threaten America.”

In fact, they see this election as a win for their agenda:

If the 2010 Republican sweep of the House signaled the rise of the Tea Party, then the 2012 election cemented the movement’s momentum despite several key losses, said scholars and Tea Party leaders.

Tea Party movement-backed candidates lost to Democrats in Indiana and Missouri, among other states, undermining Republican chances of seizing control of the Senate. But the Tea Party’s mantra of uncompromising fiscal conservatism and limited government will echo beyond this election cycle, continuing to threaten the political careers of Republicans who dare stray from the agenda or reach across the aisle, experts say.

“Some Democrats say the Tea Party is dead. That’s all baloney,” said Brigitte Nacos, a political science professor at Columbia University whose research focuses on the four-year-old movement. “The fact of the matter is when you look at the basic agenda of the Republican ticket, it’s pretty much what the Tea Party likes.”

The Tea Party has stamped its impact on the entire Republican ticket from House and Senate races up to the presidency, prompting once-moderate Mitt Romney to bend so far to the right during the primaries that he vowed to repeal the federal version of the very health care law he championed as governor of Massachusetts.

The entire presidential debate was set by the Tea Party, said Mark Meckler, cofounder of Tea Party Patriots.

“Literally, there is no alternative,” Meckler said. “President Obama was forced in the debates to call himself the president of reining in big government. That was unthinkable four years ago. The entire nature of the debate in the United States has changed because of the Tea Party movement.”

There’s some truth in that, although President Obama was always in favor of deficit reduction, so they may be overinterpreting their influence. What’s more immediately important is this, from Drudgico:

A clarifying election this was not. Instead, it’s the beginning of a stare-down that will almost certainly last months.

Washington is still sharply split along the same lines as it was before Tuesday — and both sides say the victories they cinched bolster their negotiating position.
For Republicans – led by Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – that means a temporary extension of the Bush-era tax rates for all income levels, including the wealthy. In an interview with POLITICO this week, Boehner said if Obama and House Republicans were left in power, they would have “as much of a mandate as [Obama] will…to not raise taxes.”

At the Republican National Committee’s party Tuesday night, Boehner said the takeaway from the House results is clear.

“The American people want solutions — and tonight, they’ve responded by renewing our majority,” Boehner said. “With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there is no mandate for raising tax rates. What Americans want are solutions that will ease the burden on small businesses, bring jobs home, and let our economy grow. We stand ready to work with any willing partner — Republican, Democrat, or otherwise — who shares a commitment to getting these things done.”

I think it’s interesting that he specifically said tax rates, don’t you? Usually it’s just “taxes” spat out as if they are discussing a barbaric taboo. I continue to wonder what the deal makers behind the scene have been working on. I suspect we’ll see some action on that as early as this week. Here’s what the Washington Post says about it this morning:

For weeks, Republican tax aides have been mulling ideas for a potential deal that would keep the top tax rate at 35 percent, as Republicans prefer, while enacting new provisions to extract about $55 billion next year from households earning more than $250,000 a year, meeting Obama’s goal to raise taxes on top earners.

But any such deal, they say, would hinge on Obama’s willingness to rein in the cost of federal entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare, the biggest drivers of future borrowing. Obama’s most recent budget request proposed only modest trims to federal health-care programs, totaling about $360 billion, and no changes to Social Security.

Obama went further in 2011 budget negotiations with Boehner, offering to raise the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67 and to apply a less-generous measure of inflation to Social Security benefits. It is not clear that Republicans — who have been demanding a fundamental restructuring of Medicare — would view Obama’s 2011 offer as sufficient inducement to raise taxes.

Meanwhile, many liberal Democrats are vehemently opposed to any reductions in retirement benefits, though others acknowledge that a trade will have to be made.

The question, said former White House economist Jared Bernstein, is what Democrats would be willing to give Republicans in return for prying them away from the influence of anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who has maintained firm discipline among GOP lawmakers.

“I’m sure they’re going to ask for something big,” said Bernstein, now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “I think Republicans would value something on Social Security as a real trophy.”

Well, you’d think so. But it doesn’t sound as if the Tea Partiers have wised up quite yet.

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A 4×4 sweep for marriage equality, by @DavidOAtkins

A 4×4 sweep for marriage equality

by David Atkins

Following up Digby’s excellent point last night that the November 2012 election results constitute a liberal victory is this data point: marriage equality was on the ballot four times around the country and won each and every time, despite having always failed in front of voters in the past.

First was the victory of Question 6 in Maryland, the first state in which the public approved marriage equality at the voting booth. Maine followed the same path with Question 1 to approve marriage equality winning with 54% of the vote. Washington state’s Referendum 74 gained narrow passage. And for the first time, a Constitutional Amendment to ban marriage equality failed at the polls–this time in Minnesota.

All this to go along with marijuana legalization and America’s first openly gay Senator, Tammy Baldwin.

To be sure, there are still plenty of places in the United States where the voters would not approve these measures. But after losing 32 straight times prior to this year, it’s just another sign that a majority of the American people have moved beyond conservative rhetoric and left the Republican Party dragging along in the dust behind them, standing athwart history and pointlessly yelling “Stop!” for no good reason.

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A liberal victory

A liberal victory

by digby

The good news tonight is not that the president survived. It’s that we had, as Greg Sargent points out, a liberal victory:

Obama has been reelected with a resounding victory in the electoral college (the popular vote is outstanding). Democrats have routed Republicans in the Senate races. A progressive champion has been sent to the Upper Chamber in the person of Elizabeth Warren. The first openly gay Senator — Tammy Baldwin, another solid liberal — joins her. The Dem majority will be more progressive and energetic. In Maryland, gay marriage has been ratified by popular vote for the first time.

The story of this election will be all about demographics. As Chuck Todd noted earlier today, the fact that it remained unexpectedly close in GOP-leaning southern states shows that the GOP is not keeping pace with the changing face of America. Meanwhile, Obama’s support proved unexpectedly strong among workers in the industrial midwest, thanks partly to his willingness to pursue aggressive government action to save a major American industry. Obama’s team made the right bet on the true nature of the American electorate. Rather than reverting to the older, whiter, more male version Republicans had hoped for, it continues to be defined by what Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of the ascendant” — minorities, young voters, and college educated whites, particularly women.

If the Obama team learned anything from all this it should be that they cannot be all things to all people. We disagree in this country and that’s ok.  This election wasn’t about post-partisanship, bipartisanship or “changing the tone.” This was a strictly partisan victory made up of  the Democratic Party coalition.
The liberals were validated this election and it behooves the administration to strategize their next four years with that in mind.

He’s run his last race and all he has left to worry about is properly governing the country and solidifying his legacy — and that legacy will be made or broken on how well he fulfills the agenda of those who have voted for him in massive numbers. He has a right and an obligation to unapologetically work to enact the agenda those people elected him to enact.

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Buh Bye Mitt

Buh Bye Mitt

by digby

We hardly knew ye … thank goodness

Via BagNewsNotes

I think the world dodged a bullet. A hail of them.

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The [Self] Pity Party hunkers down in fear

The [Self] Pity Party hunkers down in fear

by digby

So Alex Castellanos says that if Romney turned out the “reticent Republicans” hecan win. And who are they, you might ask?

[T]o identify our next president, we have to understand how publicly embarrassing it is to be a Republican these days.

Hollywood, the music industry, the news media, the fashion industry, the intellectual elite and the news media all fawn over Obama. To identify yourself as a Republican Romney voter, however, is to admit that you are culturally backward. In effect, survey questioners are asking Obama voters if they self-identify as cool. They are asking Romney voters if they would publicly admit to wearing socks with sandals.
Too often, Republicans dare not speak their name, because they know the cool kids won’t invite them to play.

This phenomenon, the reticent Republican factor, like the shy Tory factor found in British polls in the ’90s, could easily account for a 4% to 5% unexpected pro-Romney bump on Election Day.

Right, the GOP pity party voters who suffer because the dominant liberals are so horrible that they can’t even admit who they are in public.

You know, that’s rich coming from the people who very recently engaged in this sort of thing:

Country superstars the Dixie Chicks have been dropped from many US radio playlists after one of the singers criticised President Bush’s stance on Iraq.
Airplay for the group’s songs is down 29% on country stations, and 20% on general music stations around the country, a monitoring group has said.

The Texas female trio’s CDs have been burned and smashed – and even run over by a tractor in one event organised by a Louisiana country station.

It follows a remark by singer Natalie Maines in London that the group was “ashamed” that Mr Bush was from Texas.

Radio stations reported receiving a flood of protests from listeners angered by the comment.

And frankly, I have never known an American conservative who was afraid to admit that he was one. If anything they tend to assume that everyone else is too. But then again, they have been very, very fragile lately, what with the president using heinously insulting phrases like “voting is the best revenge” on the stump, so I suppose they might be too shy to admit they are voting to Romney.

We’ll soon find out.

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We’re not just electing a President, but two or three SCOTUS judges, by @DavidOAtkins

We’re not just electing a President, but or three SCOTUS judges

by David Atkins

Lost in much of the Presidential Election flurry this year is that the nation isn’t just electing a President and countless elected officials who have the power to affect a wide swath of public policy.

We’re also electing in essence two Supreme Court judges at a time when the Court sits on the edge of a knife. A Romney victory would almost certainly mean the end of Roe v. Wade. It would mean the obliteration of worker protections and any last remnants of controls on spending in elections. A Romney Presidency would have earthshaking implications that would extend far, far beyond the four to eight years he would be President. It would guarantee a two-generation dominance of the Supreme Court by the right wing.

Even if President Obama wins, there’s also the issue of the confirmation of his justices to the Supreme Court. The right wing knows the stakes and will as much as they possible can to prevent the nomination of Obama’s justices.

If that’s not enough to get out to vote enthusiastically in a way that prevents Romney from becoming President and that puts as many Democrats into the Senate to ensure confirmation of his judicial appointments, I can’t imagine what would be.

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