Month: November 2012

Now it's official with Florida going to Obama. Senate: 55 – 45 Democratic, an abysmal showing for the GOP in this cycle. House? 234 – 195 for the GOP.

South Orange, New Jersey, 6 am

Just a reminder of one specific prediction before the election:

I'm projecting Minnesota to go for Romney. Now, that's the only state in the union, because Mondale held it — native son Mondale held it when Romney was — when Reagan was getting 49 states — the only state that's voted Democratic in nine consecutive elections. But this year, there's a marriage amendment on the ballot that will bring out the evangelicals and I think could make the difference.

Obama won Minnesota by 53 – 45. The anti-marriage equality amendment? It failed to pass. And liberals triumphed in the legislature. I've long respected George Will, like Michael Barone. But they both simply haven't moved with the times. They're stuck in the American past and the conservative cocoon. And they have just made total fools out of themselves. Michael has written a heart-felt mea culpa on misreading the numbers and on live television was the man who talked Karl Rove out of his state of denial. George F Will's latest column takes no responsibility for his simply crazy prediction of a 321 – 217 landslide for Mitt Romney. Maybe he will do so – and explain why he had no idea that America had lots of brown and black and female and gay citizens until late Tuesday night.

But a question: If someone is that out of touch with reality, why are they given jobs as analysts in television or the newspapers? If a dentist drilled into your forehead rather than your tooth, he'd be accountable. Those paid handsomely to examine the American social and political landscape can miss by the same mile and blithely carry on as if nothing had happened.

At the very least, these conservative intellectuals need to explain their simply staggering ignorance of the country they live in, why they refused to believe the data, why they insisted that America was still where it was in 1980. If they really had integrity, an error of this magnitude, repeated with such emphasis, in the face of overwhelming evidence, up to the day before it was revealed as a total mirage, would prompt them to quit their current jobs and do something more useful.

Will Will?

Who says 5'5'' men can't dunk?

(Hat tip: Devour)

Erik Voeten wonders about drug tourism to Colorado and Washington state:

It could be that these states (and especially the border areas) are sufficiently sparsely populated that the nuisance of drug tourism is going to be less visible and the political power of those affected less strong than in densely populated The Netherlands. Nevertheless, the Dutch experience suggests that there are some downsides to being a first mover on this front. Policy makers in other countries have pointed to increases in petty crime and localized opposition as an argument against further legalization; thus amplifying the problems for the Netherlands. It may be that the American West harmonizes more quickly but we should think about why this has not happened in Europe.

Feel the spontaneous joy from the members of Minnesotans United Campaign upon hearing that the anti-equality constitutional amendment failed:

In addition to voting down the amendment, Minnesotans also gave DFL, the state's left-wing party, majorities in both the House and Senate. The interpretation from Joshua Newville:

Since last night’s election also gave the DFL control of the Minnesota legislature, and since Governor Dayton is pro-marriage equality, it is almost certain that, despite initial words to the contrary, Minnesota is now on the fast-track to also establishing marriage equality.

Doug Grow's reporting suggests otherwise:

Spending the last two years in the minority has been a sobering experience for DFLers. But it’s also been educational. They’ve seen what happens when a majority party jams things like marriage and voting amendments onto the ballo[t] without bipartisan support. DFL Rep. Ryan Winkler [a strong supporter of same-sex marriage] said watching how Minnesotans approached this election "made me proud of our state. … Minnesotans don’t like it when you overstep. That’s what Republicans did, and it’s something we have to remember, too."

Dale Carpenter, who worked on the state's equality campaign, reflects on how the amendment was defeated and its greater implications:

Winning means more state legislators willing to vote for gay marriage. Winning means a greater willingness to take this issue to the ballot in more states, including some where we’ve previously lost.  Winning means more investment by national donors.  Winning means more enthusiasm and energy, more volunteers, more effective messages, more confidence.  Winning at the ballot box had become a Sisyphean task. Again and again, we’d get tantalizing close to the summit, only to have the boulder fall back to the bottom of the hill.  And then, as we looked down to take up the task once more, we’d be taunted for having failed.

Victor Hugo said that there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.  The idea that marriage is good for all families, gay and straight, is taking hold in a religiously devout state in the middle of the country. Winning Minnesota, with the support of 1.5 million of our fellow citizens, means that our time is coming.

Nine down, 41 to go.

I didn’t run to make history.I ran to make a difference. #WIsen #Tammy2012

— Tammy Baldwin(@TammyBaldwinWI) November 7, 2012

Weigel marvels at Tammy Baldwin’s historic win – as both the first openly gay Senator and the first female from Wisconsin:

[It] may be the second-biggest story of the night. Six years ago, Wisconsin voted on one of those gay marriage bans that plagued the land in the post-Goodrich era. All but one county approved the ban. Today, they have the nation’s first openly gay senator, who now has to figure out what she wants to do with that. I’m amazed at how she came in under the radar. … Republicans underestimated her for a year, assuming that Tommy Thompson’s crossover votes would save him. (I don’t blame them!) He won his last election in 1998 by 22 points, and you look at a number like that and you figure you have some loyalty.

Transcript of Baldwin’s acceptance speech here. Ana Marie Cox looks to the horizon:

It took less than 50 years for the US to go from the first black senator of the modern era to the first black president. How long it will take to get to the first gay president is perhaps less important than being able to imagine that there could be one…. Because of Tammy Baldwin, every morning, that many more children can look in the mirror and see one, too.

(Photo: U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) celebrates her victory over Republican candidate Tommy Thompson on November 6, 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin. By Darren Hauck/Getty Images)

Noam Scheiber suspects that Ryan hurt the ticket:

[J]ust in case anyone was tempted to forget some recent history and insist that unleashing Ryan would have pushed Romney over the top, there was one place Romney simply couldn’t keep him hidden: Southeastern Wisconsin. In 2008, before Ryan became the leader of the GOP’s war on government, and long before Romney thrust him and his bold ideas into the national spotlight, Ryan carried his Wisconsin congressional district by a 29-point margin. On Tuesday, he won it by a mere 13-points, even as Obama’s Wisconsin margins fell in half. If Republicans want to try replicating this special form of magic on a national scale, I’m sure President Biden will be the first to thank them.

Here is the complete thread looking at whether or not the results of the 2012 election will finally restore reason to the Republican party.

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Thu Nov 8, 2012 – 10:42am:

Will The Right’s Fever Break?

Heritage is promising to double down on obstruction:

Massie rounds up The Corner’s reality-deficient responses to Obama’s victory:

[W]hat these eight responses demonstrate is the extent to which too many conservatives believed their own propaganda. This is what it’s like to live in a cocoon. The apparent inability to appreciate why any sane person might contemplate voting for Barack Obama is evidence of, well, of the closing of the conservative mind.

Hence the recourse to fantasies of the sort that leave the average, sober-minded voter wondering just what kind of crazy juice you’re hooked on. Obama wants to make the United States a kind of France? Check. Obama wants to crush religious liberty in America? Check. Our colleges are indoctrinating yet another generation of sadly-impressionable young American minds? Check. (Bonus: perhaps it would be better and certainly safer if fewer Americans risked going to college!) There is a War Against Americanism and Barack Obama is the enemy general? Check. The media are hoodwinking poor, gullible Americans? Check. Universal healthcare is the road to serfdom? Check. The people, damn them, are too stupid to know any better and deserve what they get? The fools. Check.

Drum fears that the GOP won’t “back down from their all-obstruction-all-the-time agenda” and we will have “four years of faux drama and trench warfare.”

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Thu Nov 8, 2012 – 11:51am:

When you have divided the world into two categories – freedom or tyranny – and there is no ground whatever between them, you are not only among the least intelligent commentators out there; you also have to be completely fanatical even in the face of popular repudiation.

I watched Fox last night. Every pore on Sean Hannity’s face quivered. He seemed close to tears at times. He blamed Obama for a horribly negative campaign. He basically told the majority of Americans who voted for a president Hannity actually seems to believe is the worst in modern times that they will now deserve their enslaved state.

The performance artist, Ann Coulter, just Etch-A-Sketched immediately to 2014. She cannot process the past, and yet she preposterously calls herself a conservative. Her gig is attacking – in the crudest, snarkiest, most cynical fashion – anything she can decide to call “liberal”. To ask her to reflect retroactively on a massive realigning loss for her kind of slash-and-burn conservatism was to ask her to do something she has no capacity to do.

O’Reilly was fascinating and immediately explained the result as a function of there being too many black and Latino and young voters who voted for “free stuff.” At no point last night did anyone on Fox even mention the four democratic victories for marriage equality across the country. When they referred to the Colorado marijuana legalization, they cut to a teenager bragging that he was going to get stoned tonight. William F Buckley was in favor of legalization. These performers had no argument as such; they just had contempt.

Yes, I watched for Schadenfreude purposes. These charlatans and money-grubbers have turned the broad tradition of Anglo-American conservatism into Southern Fried Fanaticism – and I wanted to see them crackle in their batter. They have replaced empirical doubt with unerring faith in an ideology that had its moment over thirty years ago and is barely relevant to the world we now live in. That faith has been cynically fused with fundamentalist religion to make it virtually impossible for the GOP to accept that women are the majority of voters in this country, that gay couples are equal to straight ones, that 11 million illegal immigrants simply cannot be expected to “self-deport” en masse by a regime of terrifying policing, that war is a last and not a first resort, that the debt we have is primarily a function of two things: George W. Bush’s presidency and the economic collapse his term ended with.

This kind of total fanaticism about an ideology that bears no resemblance to Burkean conservatism is often called religious. But the truly religious person is not focused on the Electoral College math, but on living her own life the right way in accordance with the God she worships. She is not obsessed with policing society to keep the “other” at bay – the homosexual, the African-American, the Latino immigrant, the single mother, the young straight dude who is truly baffled by the anachronisms of homophobia and the belief that alcohol is less harmful than marijuana.She knows that living a good life is hard enough without controlling the lives and fates and dignity of others.

But the person who fuses Manichean political warfare with theological certitude cannot, will not, abandon that stance for pragmatic purposes – because there is no greater evil than pragmatism for the fanatic. A political party can adapt and change; a fundamentalist religious party loses its entire authority if it admits error, because its message is based on religious texts that are held to be inerrant. The biggest obstacle in front of today’s GOP threfore remains theo-political fundamentalism, and how it can be overcome.

Listen to its tone, hear its anger, and absorb its utter irrelevance to anything but fantasy and delusion and mania:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

You know what, Mr Levin? The “crap” coming your way has only just begun.

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Thu Nov 8, 2012 – 1:22pm:

Michael Grunwald finds little reason to think so:

[F]or all the punditry about a coming Republican civil war, it’s not clear that the party really wants to change in any serious way — or that it could change if it wanted to. Even GOP elites, while concerned that winnable races are being sacrificed on the altar of extremism, suggest that the party is likely to stay the course that worked in 2010. Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former Republican political consultant, has been a consistent voice for pragmatism over purity inside the party, but he doesn’t foresee any radical shifts after Tuesday’s split decision. “It’s sobering that we’re throwing away Senate seats. But I don’t see a great schism,” Cole says. “I see a very unified, very conservative party that’s very alarmed about the growth of government. Who would be the generals in our great civil war?”

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Thu Nov 8, 2012 – 6:05pm:

Maddow’s thoughts on the matter:

John Heilemann sees no alternative for the GOP:

Republicans now find themselves facing a moment similar to the one that Democrats met in the wake of the 1988 election, when the party found itself markedly out of step with the country — shackled to a retograde base, in the grip of an assortment of fads and factions, wedded to a pre-modern policy agenda. And so, like the Ds back then, the Rs today must undertake a wholesale modernization of their party, starting with, but not limited to, making real inroads with those ascendant elements of the electorate. Doing so will be a Herculean task, and one that will require not just institutional resolve but individual leadership; it will require, that is to say, that the Republicans find their own version of Bill Clinton circa 1990. But daunting as the task may be, what last night indicated is that the party has no choice but to undertake the assignment — because to forgo it would be to risk not just irrelevance but extinction.

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Fri Nov 9, 2012 – 9:51am:

A reader isn’t optimistic:

I’m not expecting a change. In a just, perfect world, people would look at a media system that purposely lied to them and dashed their dreams and demand accountability – or leave them in droves. But I would be willing to bet that we will see widespread agreement on rationalizations rather than accountability, and that the ratings of the right-wing media outlets will go up, not down. In the last 48 hours I have seen and heard absolute vitriol and incomprehensible cognitive dissonance. I have been amazed at the number of people who believe that God controls everything in the world – down to the smallest detail – yet He is somehow powerless in the face of election results.

Another:

Mr. Levin and those like him are sounding an awful lot like the angry lefties they abhor – blindly ideological, impervious to contrary evidence and reality, absolutist in their belief that their ideas are actually truths, hating the “mainstream media” and creating their own outlets to tell the “real news.” Say what you want about Clinton, but tacking the Democratic party towards pragmatism in the ’90s while shutting down the extreme left wing of the party was the beginning of what happened Tuesday. The Democrats, inexplicably, have become the party of pragmatism, cohesion, and evidence.

Another ruminates at length:

One thing that is disgusting about the current GOP and something you’ve not touched on much since the 47% tape faded away, is that a core tenant of the GOP is that they are the makers and everyone else (the Democrats) are the takers. Look at most any of the commentary from the right since the election night and this is pushed over and over again: America is lost because now the takers outnumber the makers. This premise is patently and outrageously false.

And this is their default worldview now. Certainly the welfare state is not anywhere near as small as most everyone wants it to be, but to presuppose a Democratic voter is nothing less than a leach on society is flat out disgusting. The GOP starts with contempt for their fellow citizen and go down from there. They make it a practice to insult everyone in the middle and lower classes then wonder why nobody wants to join their team.

They insult women for caring about their personal health and freedom and viability in the workforce and wonder why there is a gender gap. They assume a successful person of color is a result of affirmative action and wonder why they don’t get credit for Condi Rice and Colin Powell. They refuse to accept that an effective safety net does not create mass poverty. Jesus had a lot to say about the poor in his day, yet I don’t think there was much of a safety net back then. The right wing today will demonize anyone who needs help and they demonize anyone who wants to give help. How is that American? How does any of that solve our real issues? 

The last two Democratic presidents were honest-to-goodness American Dream success stories. Men who came from broken homes and poverty only to transcend their status to become brilliant and powerful forces in America. They should be heroes to every little kid growing up in a tough neighborhood or boring suburb.

But not on the right. They degrade both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while at the same time trumpeting the privileged soft-handed sons of power. How is that American? How is that patriotic? How does this appeal to those of us who believe in our public schools and our dart league at the our favorite tavern and our “dinner for eight” every Saturday night at our church? Just because a person decides to write code for a living or they have to wait tables or they are promoted into middle management in some shitty corporation instead of “taking chances” and “sticking their neck out” as entrepreneurs or “Job Creators” doesn’t mean we are not good, loving Americans. And we vote Democratic now because we don’t want to hate our neighbors for simply being normal people. 

Not to say the Dems are the best ever – they are not – but at least they seem to want to reflect the diversity of experience that is uniquely American. From that broad base they have the mandate to solve America’s issues as a cohesive force in it together. The Republicans are looking more and more like quasi-apartheid rulers insistent that their ideological and racial and gender purity is the only thing that will hold this country together. Frickin stupid.

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