House Dems try to force vote on middle-class tax rates

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday announced Democrats would circulate a discharge petition that if successful would force a House vote to extend tax rates on households with annual income below $250,000.

The Senate has already approved the extension, but Republicans object because they want all of the Bush-era rates to be extended regardless of household income.
The move by Pelosi comes as President Obama has increased public pressure on Republicans to bend on the issue.
Read the story here.

Thousands of workers will be without retirement perks, but 19 Hostess executives will be taking bonuses from a pool of $1.75 million after a federal bankruptcy judge approved the union-opposed plan Thursday. The executives will be overseeing the company’s liquidation, which is “significantly beyond the type of jobs that [they] were doing at the start of this case,” according to the judge. On the bright side, 3,000 other employees will be getting paid beyond their salaries, and Hostess CEO Greg Rayburn declined a bonus for himself.  Read More.... 

Hostess Executives Get Bonuses

Obama's Lunch With Mittens

Mitt Romney has been as elusive as Bigfoot since he lost three weeks ago, blurry photos and all. But on Thursday he emerged from the shadows. After six long years of running for president, Romney finally waltzed into the Oval Office to lunch with re-elected President Obama. Over white turkey chili and Southwestern chicken salad, the two former opponents spoke for an hour. According to a press release from the White House, they discussed "America's leadership in the world and the importance of maintaining that leadership position in the future." And, like true frenemies, "they pledged to stay in touch."

It's hard not to read that shiny, happy description from the White House with skepticism. Their lunch was closed to the press—just the two former rivals chit-chatting with no aides present. We don't know what they talked about, but one can use one's imagination. Which Mitt Romney showed up? The old Massachusetts moderate or the bitter loser? Did he tell the president that Obamacare is the end of Western civilization? Did the president, known for his snark, launch any barbs about presenting Romney gifts? Perhaps Romney apologized for falsely centering his campaign's foreign policy on the fictitious claim that Obama had apologized for America? Or, more likely, the two slurped their soup through strained grins, anxiously checking their watches and counting down the minutes until the political photo-op was done with.

Obama Campaign Polls: How The Internal Data Got It Right

Obama's 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina sat down with Mike Allen at POLITICO's Playbook Breakfast held at The W Hotel on 11/20/12

Summing up the lessons learned from a massive investment in data and technology, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina has a blunt messagefor pollsters: "We spent a whole bunch of time figuring out that American polling is broken."

At a Politico forum on Monday, Messina spoke about the campaign's "three looks at the electorate" that gave him a deeper understanding of "how we were doing, where we were doing it, where we were moving -- which is why I knew that most of the public polls you were seeing were completely ridiculous."

David Simas, the Obama campaign's director of opinion research, provided The Huffington Post with more details about those three sources of polling data:

• Battleground Polls. The Obama campaign never conducted a nationwide survey. For a broad overview of public opinion, it relied on lead pollster Joel Benenson to survey voters across 11 battleground states (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin) at regular intervals throughout the campaign.

Benenson conducted the aggregated battleground polls once every three weeks during the spring and early summer of 2012, every other week during the late summer, and twice a week for the final two months of the campaign. These surveys were used to test messages and to glean overall strategic guidance, but not to make individual state assessments.

• State Tracking Polls. To gauge the battleground states, the campaign conducted state-specific tracking polls on a similar schedule, shifting to three-day rolling-average tracking in each state after Labor Day, with sample sizes ranging between 500 and 900 likely voters every three days. The surveys were conducted by a team of Democratic pollsters: John Anzalone, Sergio Bendixen (among Latino voters), Cornell Belcher, Diane Feldman, Lisa Grove and Paul Harstad. These surveys helped drive message testing and strategy but also tracked the standings of Obama and Mitt Romney in each state.

• Analytics. Overseen by its internal analytics staff, the campaign also conducted parallel surveys in each state to help create and refine its microtargeting models and to provide far more granular analysis of voter subgroups. These surveys used live interviewers, very large sample sizes and very short questionnaires, which focused on vote preference and strength of support, with no more than a handful of additional substantive questions. During September and October, the campaign completed 8,000 to 9,000 such calls per night.

SCOTT WALKER FIGURES IT OUT

What does a 2016 presidential aspirant do when his state votes Democratic? Rig the next election, of course. Wisconsin didn't turn into the swing state Scott Walker, Mitt Romney and the GOP had wished, with Obama carrying it by more than six percent and Democrat Tammy Baldwin winning an open Senate seat. Walker, the union-busting Koch brothers buddy, has pinpointed the source of the GOP's woes in Wisconsin—its liberal voting laws. "States across the country that have same-day registration have real problems," Walker said over the weekend, "because the vast majority of their states have poll workers who are wonderful volunteers, who work 13-hour days and who in most cases are retirees."

Those senior citizens aren't Walker's real problem, of course—it's Wisconsin's voter-friendly election laws. Since taking office he's been itching to dismantle them. In 2011, Walker signed a bill to implement a photo-ID requirement. The courts eventually overturned the proposal as unconstitutional. Dismantling same-day registration, however, likely wouldn't violate the state constitution—but could prove just as suppressive as a photo-ID law. The eight states with same-day registration have, on average, seven percent higher turnout than the national rate. That's good for little-d-democracy as well as for capitol-D-Democrats, who fare better when more people cast a ballot.
Thanks to Wisconsin's same-day registration policy, more than 70 percent of the state's eligible voters voted this year. But the governor may be able to toss aside the rule. Obama and Baldwin won the statewide races, but thanks to a district map created by Republican lawmakers, the GOP retook control of the state Senate and maintained its majority in the House. Next year, Walker and his allies will have carte blanche to implement their reactionary policies—at least until the next recall.

House GOP Sends Anti-Rice Letter

President Obama hasn’t nominated U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yet, but that isn’t stopping Republicans from preemptively protesting.  Ninety-seven House GOP members—who have no say in the confirmation process—sent the president a letter arguing Rice either “willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi affair.” The letter is the latest GOP attempt to block Rice’s nomination, after Sen. John McCain vowed to keep her from the job. Rice has several defenders, who say she based her controversial comments on CIA-vetted intelligence.

READ MORE...

Rush's Dream Journal

Republicans drifted through much of 2012 in trickle-down fantasyland, self-deporting to a mystical world where Mitt Romney's rightward shift during the primary helped their candidate. Election Day shook the party awake, forcing Republicans to reckon with their purity problem. Louisiana Governor and 2016 wannabe Bobby Jindal disavowed Romney's they-just-want-gifts comment all last week, and the Sunday shows featured a barrage of Republicans disparaging the man they had envisioned as president. "We’re in a death spiral with Hispanic voters because of rhetoric around immigration," said Senator Lindsey Graham. "And candidate Romney and the primary dug the hole deeper."

On Meet the Press, GOP strategist Mike Murphy shared the view that "the biggest problem Mitt Romney had was the Republican primary." But Murphy strayed a little too close to the third rail of conservative politics when he said the party shouldn't base its views on "Rush Limbaugh’s dream journal." Rush, of course, never takes a critique lightly. "The Republican primary, as far as [Murphy is] concerned, there were too many conservatives in it saying too many stupid things," Rush said on his radio show this afternoon. He also mocked the claim that his audience—15 million strong—is an unrepresentative slice of America. "Okay, so you people are all white, 65 and over, and you live in the sticks. And you are screwing up the Republican Party, because you are believing what I say. This is their explanation for having lost."

The media and political class quickly embraced that explanation on November 7, and Rockefeller Republicans reappeared shortly thereafter—you know, the conservatives who just want to limit government, not destroy it; who can find a middle ground on immigration reform instead of expelling 12 million people; who don't mind gay marriage, just want it left to the states. But you can't look to the rhetoric of political elites to judge whether the Republican Party will actually change the substance of its policy. That's a decision in the hands of the conservative base: Rush and his 15 million friends who reliably decide GOP primaries. And they seem none too happy about the party's return to moderation.
 

The GOP's credibility gap

By: Jennifer Granholm

The Republican Party is looking for a new identity. And they’re looking, literally, everywhere. At the Republican Governors Association in Las Vegas, former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was the most … shall we say … direct, proclaiming, “We’ve got to give our political organizational activity a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.” Lovely. Other Republicans in Vegas echoed Barbour’s comments, though with less colorful language. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell noted that, the party needs to “figure out what we did right and what we did wrong, how we can improve our tone, our message, our technology, our turnout - all the things that are required to win elections.” Bobby Jindal, who has been all over the airwaves with his suggestions, told reporters at the conference, “We need to stop being a dumb party, and that means more than stop making dumb comments.” I’m loath to give the Republicans advice, but I’d humbly suggest that rather than giving their organization an uncomfortable exam just to change their tone, technology and turnout, they consider changing their ideas. And I’d suggest they start by looking at their position on freedom. The Republican Party has a major credibility gap on that issue. Why? The Republicans are for free enterprise, but not free people. And that is their fundamental problem. Ask any Republican about the party’s core values and they’ll list a bunch of variations of the word, “freedom.” Free enterprise, free markets, free trade, economic freedom, freedom from taxation and regulation … liberty, unchaining the private sector, “Don’t Tread On Me” flags … basically get the government out of the way so private action can flourish. Like a bunch of “Bravehearts,” they just want their “freeeeeeeeeedom!!” But their freedom only applies to businesses, not individuals. For Republicans, it’s businesses that ought to be free of barriers to freely pursue commerce, but citizens must be burdened with barriers to freely exercising their rights, like the right to vote. Businesses must be trusted to act in any way they wish, but women cannot be trusted to make even their own health care decisions. Businesses ought to freely cross global borders to enjoy the global free market, but the tired, poor and hungry who yearn to be free … they’re not free to cross our borders. Business must be free to make contractual agreements, but individuals are not free to contract in marriage to whomever they may love. Businesses must be free to take risks, without regard to the size of the consequences, but individuals cannot be free to engage in personal risk-taking - like using marijuana - regardless of how small and isolated the costs may be. The reason why the GOP will continue to lose elections is because they do not understand that you cannot be the freedom party if you want to regulate the most intimate and sacred of people’s personal lives. Here’s how the demographic groups that the GOP lost hear this two-sided message: We trust business to be free, but we don’t trust you. But you cannot have liberty for only some, without lessening the liberty of all. As you do your existential soul-searching, GOP, listen to the groups you have alienated, the people from whom you have tried to deprive freedom. Minority groups and students want the freedom to vote. Women want reproductive freedom. Gays and lesbians want the freedom to marry for love. Americans with immigrant families want the opportunity for their loved ones to apply for citizenship. You will never be the party of freedom until you embrace freedom in the personal sphere as well. What the GOP must learn is that, to 99 percent of the country, economic freedom without personal freedom is no freedom at all. In short, it’s not how you sell your ideas, it’s the hypocrisy of the ideas themselves. Jennifer Granholm is the former governor of Michigan, serving from 2003 to 2011. She is now host of “The War Room” on Current TV. She is also a visiting public policy and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter @JenGranholm

Anonymous Claims to Have Hacked into Karl Rove,Vote Stealing Computer Program

Thus Stopping His Vote-Switching 

As expected, any Romney supporter (with heavy financing), was shocked at the final outcome from November 6th, the night President Obama retained his seat. We have all heard the whining, crying, finger-pointing, foul, and so on and so on. But there were a couple of items which stood out more than others.

We all know that Karl Rove flipped out on FOX News when they announced Obama won Ohio. The video is below if you haven’t seen it. Basically, Rove just could NOT understand what was happening, which is what I expected. Although he did have a very shocked “the sun just rose in the west” look on his face, and that is what surprised me. Even more shocking was hearing many top supporters and chiefs cry that Romney was supposed to win with a landslide. That is NOT what the polls had been showing the entire time.

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Karl Rove Questions Ohio Call for Obama Victory

These cyber “protectors of what’s right” – who refers to themselves as “The Protectors” – said that they had been following the digital structure of Rove’s operation and of ORCA, a Republican get out the vote software application. After finding open “doors” in the systems, they created a “password protected firewall” called “The Great Oz,” and installed it on servers that Rove planned to use on election night to re-route and change election results “from three states.”

“ORCA Killer” was launched at 10am EST followed by “The Great Oz” at 8pm EST on November 6th. Both sides watched as ORCA crashed and failed throughout Election Day. Rove even mentions computer problems while on FOX News that night. Rove’s computer techs tried 105 times to penetrate “The Great Oz” using different means and passwords.

Is this what happened to Kerry back in 2004 in Ohio when he ran against Bush? A server went down for approximately 90 minutes. When it crashed, Kerry was clearly in the lead. When it finally booted back up, Bush had taken the lead. How? Read on for a theory.

The Ohio Computer Crash in 2004

On the night of 2-3 November, 2004, the computer designated to count Ohio votes was cut out of the loop. Its web address was diverted to a private company in Chattanooga, TN, named SMARTech.

The web redirection on Election Night of 2004 went a step beyond this: Not only did the official website of the Ohio Department of State look just right, but it had the right address: http://election.sos.state.oh.us . Any citizen or press service looking for real time election results from the state of Ohio would have been directed here. In every sense, this SMARTech site became the official vote tabulation for the state of Ohio.

SMARTech leases computer servers to the Republican National Committee, and the 12-digit ISP address to which the Ohio Department of State was diverted for the 2004 vote count falls between two ranges known to be leased to the RNC. This raises the suspicion that it was an RNC computer, impersonating the state of Ohio computer, that performed the official vote tabulation in 2004. This diversion is so unusual (and brazen!) a ruse, that it is inconceivable that it happened without Blackwell’s explicit consent.

Perhaps Anonymous decided that these spoiled rich boys could no longer have their thieving, cheating way any longer. Here is the letter which was supposedly put out by Anonymous explaining how they hacked the hack. LOVE IT!!!  Oh, click on the image to pull up a PDF file.

Here is a warning from Anonymous released before the election. I wonder if Karl saw this and completely dismissed it, or if it never caught his attention.

Anon2Rove

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References:

Occupy for Accountability: Karl Rove Loses Election After Being Checkmated By Cyber Sleuths?
Democratic Underground: Anonymous Claims It Stopped Karl Rove From Hacking The Election By Hacking ORCA
Democratic Underground: Pivotal Ohio 2004 Vote-Kerry Was Ahead-Then Server Went Down for 90 Minutes-Result-Bush Had Lead!
Wonkette: ANONYMOUS CLAIMS IT STOPPED KARL ROVE FROM HACKING THE ELECTION BY HACKING ORCA, WE THINK

Right-Wingers Revolt Against Conservative Media

A story in POLITICO features Douthat and a bunch of young conservatives  scolding their elders for buying into the myths Fox perpetuates, and not finding other ways to reach the public:

And this, say next-generation Republicans, is where cocoonism has been detrimental to the cause.

The tension between the profit- and ratings-driven right — call them entertainment-based conservatives — and conservatives focused on ideas (the thinkers) and winning (the operatives) has never been more evident.

The latter group worries that too many on the right are credulous about the former.

“Dick Morris is a joke to every smart conservative in Washington and most every smart conservative under the age of 40 in America,” said Douthat. “The problem is that most of the people watching Dick Morris don’t know that.”

The egghead-hack coalition believes that the entertainment-based conservatives create an atmosphere that enables flawed down-ballot candidates, creates a cartoonish presidential primary and blocks needed policy reforms, and generally leave an odor on the party that turns off swing voters.

It even fosters an atmosphere in which there’s a disconnect with the ostensible party leaders.

Even big-ticket donors have bought into this disconnect, surrounding themselves with Fox news, talk radio and their "apocalyptic" vision. They entered the bubble wiilingly, right along with the party rank and file.

In the Washington Post, there's a profile of Beth Cox, a member of the GOP faithful who personally bought into the bubble created by the conservative media--now she is devastated by what she sees.

She turned on her computer and pulled up an electoral map that she had filled out a few days before the election. She had predicted the outcome twice — once coming up with a narrow Romney win and once more with a blowout.

Florida: red.

Colorado: red.

Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: all red.

Everything in her version of America had confirmed her predictions: the confident anchors on Fox News; the Republican pollsters so sure of their data; the two-hour line outside her voting precinct, where Romney supporters hugged and honked for her handmade signs during a celebration that lasted until the results started coming in after sundown. Romney’s thorough defeat had come more as a shock than as a disappointment, and now Cox stared at the actual results on her computer and tried to imagine what the majority of her country believed.

Cox recognized that much of the blame lay at her own party's feet:

She blamed some of the divisiveness on Republicans. The party had gotten “way too white,” she said, and she hoped it would never again run a presidential ticket without including a woman or a minority. The tea party was an extremist movement that needed to be “neutralized,” she said, and Romney’s campaign had suffered irreparable damage when high-profile Republicans spoke about “crazy immigration talk and legitimate rape.”

Still, she is one of many who now believes the country is headed to hell in a handbasket.

 

It's hard to imagine conservative media not taking the lucrative chance to capitalize on the fear and anger of people like Beth Cox. And if the party and media do change,  what will they replace the fearmongering with? Vague reassurances about "reaching out" are all we've got so far.

Soledad O'Brien Grills Rep. Joe Heck On Susan Rice

Soledad O'Brien's interview with Rep. Joe Heck on Thursday morning grew somewhat awkward when she asked the congressman to repeat himself over and over again.

O'Brien asked Heck what he would like to learn from Gen. David Petraeus when he testifies before a congressional hearing on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. She then asked him if he would prevent Ambassador Susan Rice's confirmation if the president attempted to nominate her for secretary of state.

"The fact is you can't put somebody out as the face of the issue on all the Sunday morning talk shows, and then turn around weeks later and say she knew nothing about the incident and had nothing to do with it. That's just plainly wrong," he said.

O'Brien likened the situation with Rice to Condoleezza Rice when she said that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. "If you use that measurement...and then later you determine that the information was wrong, isn't that exactly analogous to what happened with Condoleezza Rice?"

"I don't believe so, because here we had a situation where the information was wrong, not coming back and saying the person had nothing to do with the situation. I mean Condy Rice was in a position to be able to be the face, and the information was wrong. But here we had wrong information, and then weeks later, we have the administration coming back and saying, 'Well this person had nothing to do with the situation,'" Heck said.

O'Brien said she would like to go through his response more slowly. When Heck tried to clarify, O'Brien cut him off and said, "You've lost me completely. Let's back up again. I'm sorry, forgive me. But you've lost me."

"So in both cases," O'Brien said, "you have someone who says, 'We had intelligence. The intelligence is wrong. What I said is wrong because the intelligence was wrong.' How is this not analogous?"

Heck attempted to clarify once again but O'Brien cut him off, asking fellow panelist Charles Blow to help her. "I'm not trying to be facetious. I'm trying to figure out what he's saying," she said.

AP has now called CA-07 for Democrat Ami Bera

CA-07: That's a wrap, folks! The AP has now called CA-07 for Democrat Ami Bera, who defeats GOP Rep. Dan Lungren. Thursday evenining's update from Sacramento County put Bera up 5,696 votes over Lungren, meaning he captured more than 54.7 percent of the almost 20,000 votes counted since Wednesday. That brings the number of ballots outstanding to the 20,000-25,000 range; even assuming (generously) 25,000 votes left to be counted, Lungren would need more than 61% of them. That's not going to happen, which is why the AP made it's call. Congratulations, Congressman-elect Ami Bera!

Atwater's Racist Strategy Exposed

You probably remember back in September when Jimmy Carter's grandson, James Carter IV,was instrumental in digging up and helping publicize Romney's 47% video. We all enjoyed the poetic justice of the moment that very likely contributed to Romney's defeat.

Now James Carter IV is at it again, this time digging up actual audio of Republican strategist Lee Atwater explaining the "Southern Strategy":

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves...

Here is the infamous quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

It's not that the words are new. This quote has been around and known since 1981. What's new, thanks to Jimmy Carter IV's work, is that we now have audio to accompany it:

This is an exclusive from The Nation. It is quite something to hear the actual words spoken, as well as hear them in their complete context (which doesn't make them any better). There is complete audio of the interview at the link.

This is the GOP strategy since 1968, and it continues today.

BENNET OFFERED DSCC CHAIR

 Someone has to take the fall for what will likely be a lousy cycle for Democrats / take the credit for another great cycle made possible by a smorgasbord of rape comments. Politico: "Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet has been offered the DSCC chairmanship post and discussed the possibility with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Monday, a Senate aide confirmed to POLITICO. Bennet was offered the post, which is currently held by Sen. Patty Murray, late last week, and is considering it, a different source familiar with the discussions said. Bennet's name has been among four that have been floated publicly as possibilies - Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse are the others

READ MORE....

OBAMA TELLS LIBERALS HE WON'T BUDGE ON TAX CUTS

 President Barack Obama will enter high-stakes budget negotiations firmly committed to seeing the tax rates for high-income earners rise to pre-George W. Bush levels, he assured a gathering of progressive and labor leaders on Tuesday. 'I am not going to budge,' he told the group, according to an attendee who relayed material from the meeting on condition of anonymity. 'I said in 2010 that I'm going to do this once, and I meant it.' The White House did not immediately return a request for comment, but two other sources who attended the meeting confirmed the quote. The administration seems to have staked out a firmer position than during the first stand-off over the Bush-era tax cuts, in November and December of 2010, leaving the impression that it won't sign off on a compromise that doesn't increase the tax burden on the wealthy as a means of paying down the deficit.

READ MORE....

An Open Letter to the GOP and Its Supporters

Before I finish my post-election article, I am putting the text of an open letter to the GOP here. Please feel free to use portions of this letter to write to your GOP elected officials no matter where you are. Our message must be heard over the next four years, not just at the polls. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have short memories and the GOP is living in Fantasyland. Don’t think for a minute that they have any intention of cooperating. What they are expecting is for Barack Obama to compromise on every issue. That must not happen.

An Open Letter to the GOP and Its Supporters

The election is over. The American people have overwhelmingly rejected your positions on many issues and your proposed plans for this nation. At the end of the day, this election was not close on so many levels. Yet, you remain in denial of the facts in front of your collective faces.

You, your supporters, and right-wing pundits insist that we are a center-right nation. You claim that Mitt Romney lost this election because of Hurricane Sandy (interrupted his momentum) and/or Democratic voter suppression. You also claim that Barack Obama did not receive a mandate on Tuesday, November 6. None of these things are factually true. President Obama carried the critical swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida, receiving 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. If that isn’t a mandate, nothing is.

Throughout this campaign, you criticized Nate Silver for his projections, claiming that the race was too close to call. Nate Silver was spot on. He projected that Barack Obama would win 332 electoral votes. He did just that. Nate Silver was dead accurate calling 50 out of 50 states. He was right because he did the math, something neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan could do when it came to their economic policies. They couldn’t show us the math because the math didn’t add up.

You live in a world that exists only in your collective minds. The exit polls prove that America is anything but a center-right nation. In fact, the polls show that America is full of progressives:

1. 77% of those polled want abortion to remain legal.
2. 74% of those polled want to see same-sex marriage legalized.
3. 64% of those polled are in favor of a tax increase on the wealthy and protection of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
4. 74% of the American people believe that climate change is affecting our weather right now.

As difficult as this message is to swallow, here it is:

Women do not want you telling them what they can and cannot do with their bodies. Although the issues of abortion and contraception were settled years ago, the GOP chose to make them 2012 election issues. Five GOP candidates who have spent a considerable amount of time discussing and redefining rape have been voted out. In contrast, a record number of women are now serving the nation. Massachusetts put its first woman in the Senate in Elizabeth Warren. In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay Senator in history. Add to the list Tammy Duckworth (WI), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), and Maize Hirono (HI). All six of the women running for reelection won. Women not only want their voices heard, they want to be part of shaping policy.

The American people have always been ahead of the politicians on the issue of same-sex marriage. For years the GOP, prodded by the religious right zealots, have pushed to have same-sex marriage become a ballot issue. You got your wish this election cycle, and same-sex marriage became legal by vote in Maine, Maryland, and Washington state. The vast majority of Americans want you to deal with real issues, not manufactured issues. They want you to stop wasting taxpayer dollars supporting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which has now been declared unconstitutional by a record-breaking eight federal courts.

The American people favor a tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, and they want Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security protected. Americans know that Social Security is not “nearly bankrupt” as the GOP continues to insist. They know that the trust can be preserved for years to come by balancing the equation: There’s no reason why a millionaire should be paying Social Security taxes at the same rate as someone earning $110,000 a year. By the way, the American people do not see these programs as “entitlements.” They are “earned benefits” that have come from years of work and paying taxes.

While the GOP spends its time denigrating the science behind global warming, the majority of the American people now believe that climate change is having an effect on our weather right now. The GOP energy plan to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline and drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will not bring us energy independence, and will only add to our environmental woes. It will also ensure that we are tied to fossil fuels for years to come. This may well be what big oil wants, but it is clear that the American people want our nation to move in another direction. You do not govern for the corporations. You govern for the people.

Because of Citizens United, the corporations and special interests in this nation poured in excess of $300 million dollars into this election trying to get Mitt Romney elected. This too was overwhelmingly rejected by the American people. Corporate America might have thought this ill-advised decision would stand forever because it is unlikely that the Supreme Judicial Court will ever reverse itself. However, on election day, Montana and Colorado became the 10^th and 11^th state to formally call for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. We are more than one-quarter of the way toward meeting the Constitutional requirements for an amendment to overturn.

Finally, do not think for a minute that you have the upper hand. You do not. The American people have President Obama’s back, and believe that his second term belongs to them. They will no longer settle for compromise. They are tired of obstruction. On November 6, President Obama was indeed given a mandate to move this country forward. Either you get on board and help shape the nation that the American people have called for, or you will be voted out in the midterm elections.

Rasmussen Polling= #RasmussenFail

Ohio -- Rasmussen: dead heat. Actual: Obama by 2.

Virginia -- Rasmussen: Romney +2. Actual: Obama by 3.

Iowa -- Rasmussen: Romney +1. Actual: Obama by 6.

Wisconsin -- Rasmussen: tie. Actual: Obama by 7.  

Colorado -- Rasmussen: Romney +3. Actual: Obama by 5.

ANALYSIS: The Times breaks down Election Day

Some conservative media outlets used the Rasmussen polling to prop up a narrative in the final days of the campaign that Romney had momentum and a good chance of winning the White House.

Averages of all the big polls tended to show otherwise — giving Obama a razor-thin margin in the popular vote and small but consistent leads in most of the battleground states that would decide the election.

In many of those battlegrounds, Rasmussen’s preelection surveys stood out. Other polls mostly showed Obama with a lead, sometimes larger than the polls’ margins of error.

Rasmussen has drawn scrutiny before because it employs automated surveys that do not reach mobile phones, which more and more Americans use as their primary form of communication.

The pollster also “weights” results to try to predict the party identification of the electorate. Other pollsters frown on this approach, saying one of the primary functions of the polls is to assess whether voters consider themselves Democrats, Republicans, members of some other party or no party.

Bill Maher: Republicans are screwed up from living in a bubble

Bill Maher: Republicans are screwed up from living in a bubble (via Raw Story )

Comedian Bill Maher said Wednesday night that Republicans needed to escape the “Republican bubble” if they wanted to win a future presidential election. “Republicans have to start getting their information from a better source than Fox News,” he told MSNBC host Chris Matthews. “I’m not…

Comedian Bill Maher said Wednesday night that Republicans needed to escape the “Republican bubble” if they wanted to win a future presidential election.

“Republicans have to start getting their information from a better source than Fox News,” he told MSNBC host Chris Matthews. “I’m not kidding about this. I think this really screws them up.”

Maher joked that Republicans even had their own polls, alluding to Rasmussen Reports. Despite most polls showing President Barack Obama would defeat Mitt Romney, many conservative pundits still insisted that the Republican candidate would be victorious.

“They were shocked by this election,” Maher continued. “They have to somehow fix the way they get information, because they only talk to each other and they don’t know what is going on in the real world — and they were rudely awakened last night.”

Maher described Election Day as a victory for “pot, gay marriage, and math.”

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Why The Left Won

So, just like 2008, Obama took an expected win and did even better than most people expected. Indeed, plenty of Democrats did, including Elizabeth Warren and Claire McCaskill, though in the latter case, it’s more a result of her opponent losing. This election is, I really do believe, more evidence that this country is finally moving into its future. It’s in fits and starts, and there are plenty of setbacks. The liberal coalition has way more people in it, but conservatives continue to be much better at voting. That means we are often in serious danger of having a minority that hates the majority rule the country. This election once again proves that liberals have the hearts and minds of this country, and we just need to move asses to the polls. Bob Moser’s take is exactly right:

Until Tuesday night, it remained possible that a Republican Party supported almost exclusively by conservative white people could win one last time and could then proceed to dismantle the social-welfare system so thoroughly over the next four or eight years that it would take decades to rebuild it again.

But Americans didn’t let it happen. The president ran, and won, on the most resonant pro-government message Democrats have offered in four decades. They did it by assembling the most diverse political coalition in the nation’s history—huge majorities of young people, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, and highly-educated whites.

The road ahead, for liberals, is long and hard. Our social safety net and investment in ordinary working people who actually run this country is in tatters, decimated by years of Republican efforts and Democrats letting (or even making) it happen, incorrectly believing that’s what the country wants. The Affordable Care Act was saved last night, and it’s got a lot of good stuff in it, but it needs to be built upon. (But if we didn’t pass it, we couldn’t build on it, something that a lot of people who attack Obama from the left fail to understand.) We need to continue to push for a public option and lowering of the Medicare age to 55. We need to push for more government spending to get this economy healthy again. We need serious legislation to address climate change, and we need to start investing in infrastructure to protect ourselves against future disasters like Hurricane Sandy. We need to get serious about liberalizing our immigration laws. We need to help expand access to abortion and contraception. There’s a lot that needs to be done.

But last night proved—and I hope Democrats are paying attention—that this is what the country wants. We’re not a bunch of conservatives who only vote for Democrats by accident. This is aliberal nation. It’s only going to become more liberal. Democrats can move to the left and they will be rewarded at the polls. After all, conservatives have been calling Obama a “socialist” for four years now, and the public basically responded by saying, “Sounds good to me!” We’re liberals. Time to start governing like it.

GOP VOTER FRAUD

"The investigation into the arrest of a man on charges of dumping voter registration forms last month in Harrisonburg, Va., has widened, with state officials probing whether a company tied to top Republican leaders had engaged in voter registration fraud in the key battleground state....   

"Nine Florida counties reported in September that hundreds of voter registration forms submitted by Sproul’s 

firm contained irregularities such as suspicious, conflicting signatures and missing information.

"Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign paid Sproul’s firm $71,000 late last year for 'field consulting.'

"American Crossroads, the political organization that Republican operative Karl Rove helped found, paid Sproul’s firms $1.5 million in the week before the 2010 midterm elections for get-out-the-vote efforts and voter phone calls, according to a review of election records."
—Carol D. Leonnig and Tom Hamburger, The Washington Post
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