The folk music in Ethiopia is usually played with folk dancing, in a very attractive and dramatic manner. It is also accompanied by clapping of the hands associated with the beats rhythm. Folk dancing has an overall impressive defect that provides a picture of graceful body movement, facial expression, captivating and enthralling to the extreme. Each of the ethnic groups in Ethiopia has its own distinctive style of dancing. For instance;
The Gurage are famous in their vigorous jumping, thumping of the feet and swaying of the body from side to side.
For most of the Oromos, the head and the neck do most of the movement.
A shoulder and chest dance also called “Eskista” is common for most of Amharas. Both shoulders are moved in a series of motions forwards and backward.
Pingback: Dr. Sherry E. Showalter – "Keepin It Real"
Dead pig left at Republican HQ in Manhattan Beach
http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/story?section=news/local/los_angeles&id=8879421
MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. (KABC) — A dead pig clad in a Mitt Romney T-shirt was left at a Republican campaign office in Manhattan Beach.
Manhattan Beach Police had to discard the pig’s head and its feet in a trash bin, but not before several passersby saw it.
“I thought it was a dead body because of the way he approached it,” said Manhattan Beach resident Andy Gaeta. “And then when he lifted the shirt, he saw the head wrapped in barbed wire and it’s cut in half, the whole skull was. It looked like something from a butcher’s market.”
The pig was laid out at the doorstep of the Republican headquarters on Highland Avenue.
Tom Scully saw the display about 6:30 a.m. while he was out walking his dog.
“When I got closer I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of gross. There was like barbed wire on its head. It’s nasty,” said Scully.
Manhattan Beach Police Animal Control later removed the trash bin containing the pig’s remains, taking it as evidence. Police say they’re investigating the incident as an “illegal dumping of an animal carcass.”
According to a police sergeant, they have no evidence suggesting any other crime was committed at this point.
No notes were left behind. Nothing was addressed to anyone.
There will be a forensic examination of the remains.
To one Manhattan Beach resident, the disturbing display suggests political attacks during the election took their toll on the community.
http://youtu.be/_MKgy6OEWPk
The Story Behind the Internet’s Most Popular Photo
This photo, along with the simple caption “Four more years” became the most tweeted and most liked on Facebook photograph ever, and it did so with incredible speed. We thought you’d like to hear the story behind it. It’s probably not what you imagined.
To get the scoop, we went straight to the woman who snapped the photo herself. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Scout Tufankjian.
http://gizmodo.com/5959053/exclusive-the-story-behind-the-internets-most-popular-photo
Rove accuses Dems of ‘suppressing the vote’
By Steve Benen
Thu Nov 8, 2012 3:30 PM EST
I wouldn’t ordinarily focus on Karl Rove twice in one afternoon, but this latest development suggests the Republican strategist is losing it.
Hmm. So now we’re to believe Obama was “suppressing the vote.” It reminds me of Rove complaining in June that Democrats are “trying to take their wallet and buying” the election — while he raised millions from billionaires so he could buy the election.
But putting that aside, this notion that negative ads constitute voter “suppression” is important because it’s crazy.
On the one hand, we see Rove’s party, which spent two years imposing the most sweeping new voting restrictions seen in the United States since Jim Crow, targeting likely Democratic constituencies. On the other hand, we see the president, who ran television commercials that criticized his opponent.
One party engaged in voter suppression through legal disenfranchisement, while the other party shaping its message to maximize the electoral impact. For someone to see these as comparable is to strip the word “suppression” of any sensible meaning.
I realize Rove is having a tough time right now, but this is deeply ridiculous
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/11/08/15027587-rove-accuses-dems-of-suppressing-the-vote?lite
YOU ALL MUST CHECK OUT THE NEW THREAD. WARNING: truckload of KLEENEX needed!
‘There is some holy hell to pay’
By Steve Benen
Thu Nov 8, 2012 11:33 AM EST
I’ve never fully understood how Karl Rove developed a reputation as a strategic genius.
In 2000, it was Rove’s idea to keep George W. Bush in California in the campaign’s waning days, instead of stumping in key battleground states. Bush lost California by a wide margin, and Rove’s strategy practically cost his candidate the election.
In 2006, after nearly getting indicted, Rove’s sole responsibility was overseeing the Republican Party’s 2006 election strategy. He told NPR in late October that he’d found a secret math that gives him insights that mere mortals can’t comprehend, and soon after, Democrats won back both chambers of Congress in a historic victory.
And then there’s this year, when Rove’s Republican attack operation spent nearly $400 million and lost just about every race it contested — not to mention Rove’s on-air tantrum that’s already become the stuff of legend.
I think it’s safe to say the bloom is off the rose.
“The billionaire donors I hear are livid,” one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. “There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing.”
Rove’s operation is holding a phone call for its big donors today “to sum up the race.” That ought to be fun, right?
There’s also the question of Rove’s future. Conservative activist Richard Viguerie said in a statement yesterday that “in any logical universe,” Rove “would never be hired to run or consult on a national campaign again.”
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/11/08/15024075-there-is-some-holy-hell-to-pay?lite
Jeff Gauvin @JeffersonObama
BREAKING: KARL ROVE IS BEING CHASED BY BILLIONAIRE DEBT COLLECTORS
California’s approach: Vote everywhere
By Laura Conaway
Thu Nov 8, 2012 6:00 PM EST
Sarah comments from California:
I live in Los Angeles. We have plenty of voting precincts and machines available. California has thousands of polling precincts, each serving maybe 200 people or
so. Lines at the end of the day are long, but nothing to compare when looking at
Ohio or Florida or other states.
How do we do it? We have polls set up everywhere (and I mean everywhere):
-wedding chapel
-garage of lifeguard headquarters
-private home
-garage
-school auditorium
-Krishna temple
-union office
-police museum
-Cetacean Society building
-fire station
-Columbarium
-party supply store
-Echo Park indoor pool
-laundromat
My point is that Los Angeles facilitates the voting process, bringing it as close to the place where people live as possible, making the precincts small enough to be manageable.
It’s not that hard to do.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/
The entire segment is well worth watching. Maddow was on fire. She explained what we dodged by NOT electing Willard, and this is the tail end of that long segment.
http://youtu.be/SVwXA7sHUlE
here is the entire segment. it’s righteous
http://youtu.be/zRpSAKw0V48
Ametia says:
Mtti Romney before the election: “I’M SEVERELY CONSERVATIVE.”
Mitt Romney after the election: “I’M SEVERELY SHELL-SHOCKED!”
check
graphic pretty please! ;-)
The Obamas Marriage: Love On Display During Presidential Acceptance Speech
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/the-obamas-marriage_n_2089210.html
Newly reelected President Barack Obama may have solidified his place as best presidential husband with his sweet remarks about wife Michelle in his victory speech Tuesday night.
“Michelle, I have never loved you more,” he said. “I have never been prouder to watch the rest of America fall in love with you, too, as our nation’s first lady.”
First ladies are no strangers to presidential acceptance speeches, and whether their husbands are Republican or Democrat, it seems their love and support does not go unnoticed on election night.
TRUE Love
Man, I love this picture
She LITERALLY & FIGURATIVELY’s got his back. POWERFUL.
BREAKING: AP: Obama to make first postelection comments on economy, fiscal cliff at the White House Friday
rolandsmartin@rolandsmartin
How ticked was @mittromney after he lost? After concession speech, campaign credit cards were cancelled; staffers had to pay for cab rides
Rik; you always said, these folks were robbing Mittens. He wasn’t going to win, and they knew it, just kept taking his money and telling him he’s their DADDY! BWA HA HA
Party’s over.
FROM BALLOON JUICE:
J.D. Rhoades Says:
@Calouste:
The GOS reports that Romney has conceded Florida.
So THAT’s why I felt a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced, followed by a crescendo of whining.
SIMPLY BEAUTIFUL
beeee uuuuu teeee ful
a work of ART… :-)
LMBAO Wassama-tU?!!!
Wow! They really were delusional..for real!
Mitt Romney was “shellshocked” at losing the presidential race, an adviser tells CBS News.
“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.”
Said the adviser: “We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory. I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming. ( :o )”
Another staffer added: “There’s nothing worse than when you think you’re going to win, and you don’t. It was like a sucker punch.”
… http://politicalwire.com/archives/2012/1…_loss.html
Scary, just downright frightening that Romney & CO acting shell-shocked. This MOFO STRAIGHT-FACED LIED his way through an election cycle to get his ass in the WH. Fuck him and the Rafalca he rode in on.
James Carville: If Election Night Were A Play, It Should Be Titled ‘The Ass-Whuppin’ Cometh’ [VIDEO] http://mediaite.com/a/rcivp —->332 –206
Jim Williams: When you piss away a half billion of rich guys’ money and produce no results, you might want to join the witness protection program.
LOL That’s why Rove is yelling reverse voter suppression, You’d think he’d go hide out in a cave, but seriously, he’s out on Fox continuing with his bag-o-tricks.
AINT NOTHING WORSE…
than rich people who got the grift played on them in front of the entire world.
BWA HA HA HA HA HA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLo0Jwj03JU
NOW SHELL-SHOCKED MITTENS, THIS IS HOW IT FEELS TO LOSE.
Romney Campaign Concedes FL
Romney campaign: We lost Florida -NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!
President Obama will win Florida when all votes are counted, judging from the makeup of the ballots still outstanding from heavily Democratic counties.
BY MARC CAPUTO
MCAPUTO@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Though votes are still being tallied, President Obama is all but assured a victory in Florida because the lion’s share of the outstanding ballots come from Democratic-heavy counties.
Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney by 55,825 votes — or 49.9 percent to 49.24 — but there just aren’t enough votes from Republican areas to allow the challenger to catch up.
Romney’s Florida campaign has acknowledged their candidate lost in Florida as well. Romney already conceded the national race after he lost the other battleground states.
“The numbers in Florida show this was winnable,” Brett Doster, Florida advisor for Romney, said in a statement to The Miami Herald. “We thought based on our polling and range of organization that we had done what we needed to win. Obviously, we didn’t, and for that I and every other operative in Florida has a sick feeling that we left something on the table. I can assure you this won’t happen again.”
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/08/3087995/romney-campaign-we-lost-florida.html#storylink=cpy
With Florida’s 29 Electoral College votes, Obama will have 332 votes to Romney’s 206.
Jared Lee Loughner sentenced to life in prison
By James Ball, Updated: Thursday, November 8, 1:42 PM
A federal judge in Arizona sentenced Jared Lee Loughner to life in prison without parole Thursday for a 2011 Tucson shooting rampage after several of his victims, including former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, confronted him in court.
Loughner received a sentence of seven consecutive life terms plus 140 years in prison for killing six people and wounding 13 others, including Giffords. The 24-year-old college dropout, who has a history of psychiatric disorders, agreed in August to a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/gabrielle-giffords-confronts-shooter-jared-lee-loughner-in-court/2012/11/08/09968fe2-29c7-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html
THU NOV 08, 2012 AT 11:01 AM PST
The real Mr.47% – Mitt Romney
Doing a little rounding magic, this election proved who the Poster Boy for the 47% this election year was – MITT ROMNEY!
To wit Romney’s vote total in the following states:
Colorado – 47%
Iowa – 47%
Nevada – 47%
New Hampshire – 47%
Pennsylvania – 47%
Virginia – 47%
Wisconsin – 47%
Amazingly, ALL of the above states were amongst the most contested “swing states”, and Romney didn’t hit 48% in ANY of them. And, in the biggie, Ohio? 48.2%!
One final stat. The Gender Gap. Wanna know what percent of the vote were cast by Romney’s strong suit (MEN)? 47%
And, Romney is, with a bit of rounding magic, at just about 47% in the NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE to boot – ain’t irony a b!tch?!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/08/1158980/-The-real-Mr-47-Mitt-Romney
Plus Mittens was born in, you guessed it 19-47
Dems did all kinds of this on Tuesday; let’s keep it going folks!
Minnesota didn’t take shit from nobody
NO ON MARRIAGE AMENDMENT
NO ON VOTER REGISTRATION BULLSHIT
Absentee-ballot count finished by Miami-Dade; election chief fends off criticism over delay
Long voting lines in South Florida drew criticism, but nowhere was worse than Miami-Dade. Mayor Carlos Gimenez acknowledged some problems, and ordered a review.
BY CURTIS MORGAN, JAY WEAVER AND PATRICIA MAZZEI
CMORGAN@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The absentee ballot count is mercifully over.
Miami-Dade elections workers counted a final batch of 500 absentees Thursday morning, after pulling an all-nighter.
Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley fended off criticism Thursday that the county’s election was less than perfect, when she announced the completion of the county’s absentee ballot count about 40 hours after the polls closed on Election Day.
“Generally, I think Miami-Dade County conducted a very good election,” Townsley told reporters at the elections office in Doral, as she deflected questions about long lines and voting delays at the polls. “Am I embarrassed or disappointed by some of the things that happened? Absolutely. But I have to focus on simply getting it right.”
The last-minute surge of some 54,000 absentees cast up until the closing of the polls on Election Day caused an extraordinary delay in tabulating the final results for Miami-Dade’s vote.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/07/3086920/absentee-ballots-voting-delays.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_afternoon&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_afternoon&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet#storylink=cpy
Nice try Karl
Karl Rove: Obama Succeeded ‘By Suppressing The Vote’
IGOR BOBIC 2:43 PM EST, THURSDAY NOVEMBER 8, 2012
Karl Rove told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly on Thursday that President Obama won re-election “by suppressing the vote” with negative campaign ads that “turned off” potential voters, citing a victory that carried a smaller percentage of the popular vote compared to that of the 2008 presidential race.
Rove also praised Mitt Romney for a job well done, but criticized his campaign for failing to combat President Obama’s Bain attack ads early on.
“He ran a valiant race,” Rove said of Romney. “To suggest all this could have been easily won had there been somebody else, I just don’t buy that.”
“The first group to respond to attacks on Bain was American Crossroads,” Rove added, who co-founded the super PAC.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/rove-obama-succeeded-by-suppressing-vote
Quote for the Day
“The billionaire donors I hear are livid … There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing,” – A “Republican operative,” to HuffPo.
BWA HA HA HA So are they asking Mittens and nem for a REFUND?
Will The Right’s Fever Break? Ctd
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.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/11/will-the-rights-fever-break-ctd-1.html
TPM2012
Colbert: ‘Traditional’ — aka White — America Is Over
Depressed after President Obama’s re-election, Stephen Colbert on Wednesday clung to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s theory: “traditional America” is over. The election, O’Reilly said, was decided by minority voters who want “things” and “stuff” from the government.
“Yes, traditional America is no more,” Colbert said. “That’s all American traditions: no more trick or treating, no more homecoming, when someone sneezes, you have to say, ‘happy holidays.’”
O’Reilly is right about America, Colbert added. “The white establishment, guys like us, we’re the minority now. And we’re helpless against this tide of non-white people who want ‘stuff’ and ‘things.’ They’re the thing-stuff-wanters. Whereas traditional white people — of any race — we don’t want things. We have things. Okay?”
Watch the video:
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/colbert-america-election.php
To continue the conversation from last thread about the ‘ perceived’ threat to the voting rights.
You want to know something, their arrogance knows no bounds.
They thought that we hadn’t been Black longer than 3 days in America..
and, that we haven’t lived under the 43 White Presidents that preceeded Barack Obama.
and, that we couldn’t see the disrespect shown this President AND HIS ENTIRE FAMILY that hadn’t been done to any other President.
They thought just because we didn’t say anything about it, except for within the confines of talking to each other..
that we didn’t see what was going on.
But, they failed to note that we understand America far better than they ever will..
and, that we weren’t going to do something that wouldn’t benefit the President.
we would hold our tongues and make our voices heard on Election Day 2012.
And, when I say WE….
I don’t mean just BLack people.
I said this awhile ago, and I mean it…
I believe every NON-WHITE PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY – who isn’t a sellout…
has quietly observed the disrespect shown this President.
The numbers that shocked them on Tuesday?
SEVENTY ONE PERCENT OF LATINOS.
SEVENTY SIX PERCENT OF ASIANS.
They thought the Asians were ‘ down with White is right’.
Asians never said shyt, but went into that voting booth and pulled that lever for PBO.
they thought they could lable us with’ imagining’ the disrespect shown this President.
Just like we ‘imagine’ the slights shown to us in our daily lives.
TELL THE TRUTH; AND SHAME THE DEVILS, RIK
Voting is POWER; and as long as we have that right, we’d better keep excersing it.
.
The GOP tried to suppress our vote and got routed! Don’t mess with us!
In the words of Sophia: stood in that line, stood in that line,til we near about done rot to death and pulled that lever for President Obama!
Ohio! Ohio! Thank you so much! You did that damn thang!
Romney Planned Victory Fireworks Show Over Boston Harbor
David Taintor – 12:55 PM EST, Thursday November 8, 2012
Mitt Romney planned to celebrate election-night victory with a fireworks display over the Boston Harbor, the Boston Globe reports:
A permit filed with the City of Boston said the detonation could occur any time between 7 p.m. Tuesday, just after the first polls closed, and 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, which ended up being just before Romney conceded the race.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-planned-victory-fireworks-show-over-boston-harbor
Here’s another story to make you go HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
……………………………
Judge demands Ohio provisional ballot answers from Husted’s office
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – A federal judge on Wednesday angrily demanded that attorneys for Ohio’s elections chief name the author of an election-eve order that placed the responsibility of explaining what kind of identification voters use on provisional ballots on the voters themselves.
U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley’s voice rose nearly to a shout at times as he asked attorneys what research the Ohio Secretary of State’s office had done before issuing Friday’s after-hours order.
“You have a lot of explaining to do,” Marbley told assistant Ohio attorney general Aaron Epstein at a hearing in Columbus the morning after the election. A few minutes later, he demanded that Epstein and other state attorneys explain the rationale behind the order.
“Show me the facts that the secretary used to make the decision to change this directive at 7 o’clock on a Friday night on the eve of an election,” Marbley said. “I want to see it, and I want to see it now.”
http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/state/Judge-demands-Ohio-provisional-ballot-answers-from-Husteds-office#ixzz2BeqjkWmh
how these two stories relate together:
from POU:
Miranda
I totally believe they thought it really would come down to Ohio and they were gonna rig it. Husted tried everything and I think they got scared. Between the turnout, the federal judge who was keeping an eye on him, the DOJ having hundreds of attorneys in OH just to watch out – if they had tried to change up the numbers I think an injunction on declaring any numbers was already drafted and the judge standing by with a nice ballpoint pen to sign it and every voting machine in the state would have been impounded and the best technology forensic experts at the FBI would have simply caught it. They were scared, they backed out and then got to scared to call Rove and tell him. Thus he was in a panic he could not control for the whole world to see.
If turnout hadn’t been astronomical, they would have done it.
Husted and Scott from Florida need a good ass-whupping for the shit they tried to pull on POC. No doubt in my mind these MOFOs were trying to steal the election for Mittens. they didn’t even try to hide it, right up to the last minute, but there were
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY to many negroes, Latinos, Asianoes- ok so I made up that one. to TAKE AWAY OUR VOTING RIGHTS.
Major Props to these two brave, courageously, SMART WARRIOR SISTAS!
They’re TAYLOR-MADE
Ohio State Senator Nina Taylor & Wisconsin State Senator Lena Taylor
Strong advocates and defenders of American’s VOTER RIGHTS!!
I love Ms. Nina Taylor. She is Ms. Harriet Tubman, Ms. Fannie Lou Hammer And Ms. Barbara Jordan, All rolled into one love her.
Time for another repost of this thread
Barbara Billingsley, “June Cleaver” Dies: The Symbology of an Era Gone By
Posted on October 18, 2010 by Ametia
Barbara Billingsley- December 22, 1915 – October 16, 2010 RIP Mrs. Cleaver.
Starred as June Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver from 1957-1963
As a child, I can’t tell you how many times my siblings and I would fight over who would control the tv channels in our home. I was born in 1955. Our household didn’t get a TV until 1959.
Our family watched Leave it to Beaver. The Cleaver’s house was nestled in white suburbia in a fictitious town called “Mayfield.” My brothers would always snicker over Wally and the Beaver’s shenanigans, because a lot of my brother’s antics mirrored the Cleaver boys.
http://3chicspolitico.com/2010/10/18/barbara-billingsley-june-clever-dies-the-symbology-of-an-era-gone-by/
THIS IS HILARIOUS!!
http://youtu.be/APFPu_l_E4E
BWA HA HA HA HA
HuffPost Politics@HuffPostPol
Sources: Democrats planning post-inauguration immigration reform push in Senate http://huff.to/RlP6A0
PERCEIVED?
W-T-F YOU MEAN, PERCEIVED?
……………………………………
Black electorate responds mightily to perceived voter-intimidation efforts
…
Analysts, voters and politicians said that a series of episodes here in Ohio — where exit polls showed black voters accounting for 15 percent of Tuesday’s electorate, up from 11 percent in 2008 — were seen by African Americans as efforts to keep them from voting, stirring a profound backlash on Election Day.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/black-electorate-responds-mightily-to-perceived-voter-intimidation-efforts/2012/11/07/d7596304-2900-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html
…
You know, I had to walk away from this because I was so fucking mad.
perceived.
how come anything that Black folks understand to be true is ‘perceived’.
it’s only ‘ perceived’, because folks, BLack, White, Latino, et al, stood up and said
HOLD UP
about you mofos thinking you’re going to disenfranchise FIVE MILLION AMERICANS with these Voted ID Laws.
I can name – on one hand- the people in the MSM who took the possible stripping of the right to vote from FIVE MILLION AMERICANS SERIOUSLY.
Of course, if it had come to pass….and those FIVE MILLION PEOPLE HAD BEEN STRIPPED OF THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE
we wouldn’t have heard SHYT from clowns like this.
They mad that we fought their fucking laws.
They mad that we came out to vote.
They mad we stood in those lines.
PERCEIVED?
G-T-F-O-H
it was as real as the keyboard that I’m typing on.
they tried everything, and shyt came up snakeeyes because
‘ those people’ showed up to vote.
they’re in shock, and they want it to be the ‘ good old days’ when they could take the right to vote and steal elections in the dead of night.
Husted of Ohio truly thought someone was playing with him, but that judge wasn’t.
And, all those people who voted early weren’t.
And the people standing in those lines weren’t.
He realized that all eyes were on him, and that shyt about Tagg owning voting machines came out BEFORE the election, so eyes truly were on him..
and he knew, his ass was going to JAIL.
NOBODY was playing with him.
it finally dawned on him.
it finally dawned on the lot of them…
Nobody was ever playing with them.
EPIC RANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Go, Rikyrah! Go! Tell these mofos something!
They mad that we came out to vote.
They mad we stood in those lines.
____________________
THIS
RIGHTEOUS RANT
Romneyworld reckoning begins
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83549.html
BOSTON — Advisers to Mitt Romney insisted Wednesday that they were surprised by the scale of their loss to President Barack Obama, while big-time GOP donors griped about the campaign’s unflinching confidence in the final stretch.
As results began to stream in Tuesday night, prominent Romney supporters in Boston tried to stay positive, reassuring themselves that there was still a path to the White House. But dejection quickly turned to anger a day after an Electoral College rout that shocked many who had heard self-assured projections about voter enthusiasm and turnout in private conference calls and meetings in the campaign’s final stretch.
“They ran a 20th century campaign in the 21st century,” said one Romney bundler, frustrated that the campaign made assumptions about the youth vote and voter intensity that didn’t pan out. “The anger is that they were entrusted to do certain things. It’s not like they were paid a $5,000 retainer to get a few dozen articles in an inside-the-Beltway paper. This is the major leagues.”
excerpt
“There were a lot of Republicans who were on calls that the campaign was having led to believe we had shots in Pennsylvania and Minnesota,” one Republican operative supporting Romney said. “I think Republicans are split right now between confused and shocked, and also I think they are wondering did the Romney campaign have numbers we didn’t have.”
Somebody is maaaaaaad…
Better than 80/20 Latino Vote
By mistermix November 8th, 2012
Ho-lee shit:
“For the first time in US history, the Latino vote can plausibly claim to be nationally decisive,” Stanford University university professor Gary Segura, who conducted the study, told reporters.
According to Segura, the Latino vote provided Obama with 5.4 percent of his margin over Romney, well more than his overall lead in the popular vote. Had Romney managed even 35 percent of the Latino vote, he said, the results may have flipped nationally.
The effect was at least as dramatic in swing states, most notably in Colorado, which Obama won on Tuesday. There Latinos went for the president by an astounding 87-10 margin, an edge not far from the near-monolithic support he received from African American voters. In Ohio, with a smaller but still significant Latino population, Obama won by an 82-17 margin.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/11/08/better-than-8020-latino-vote/
Women and People of Color Will Be a Majority of Democrats in the House
http://bit.ly/PGJIcj
Bloomberg Businessweek notes changes in the House that, in many ways, mirror the demographic shifts that have altered the country’s landscape:
Here’s more from Bloomberg:
Come January, women and minorities for the first time in U.S. history will hold a majority of the party’s House seats, while Republicans will continue to be overwhelmingly white and male. The chamber, already politically polarized, more than ever is going to be demographically polarized, too.
“One thing that’s always been very startling to me is to see that on the floor of the House of Representatives when you look over on one side where the Democrats caucus and you look to the other side and it looks like two different visions of America,” Edwards, 54, a black woman who has served in Congress since 2008, said in a telephone interview.
31 Latinos will serve in U.S. Congress next year… the most EVER http://huff.to/YMyntM
____________________
WOOT!
Election Post Mortem and Some Tough Love
November 08,2012
By Bob Cesca: There’s been an understandable amount of discussion since Tuesday night about how the Republicans failed and what they can do to improve. I love a good concern-trolling post as much as anyone, especially in the wake of such an exhilarating victory.
Let’s face it, though. Do we sincerely want the Republicans to soften their regional white Christian epistemic self-marginalization?
Ultimately, Republican policies are misogynistic, bigoted, obsolete and ineffectual; their politics are toxic and exploitative; their media presence is a screechy echo-chamber of gibberish and conspiracy theories; and they’re rightly suffering the consequences of this deadly cocktail. If they’d prefer to self-destruct, fine. As such, they should stay away from Nate Silver’s wizardry and stick with Unskewed Polls and Rush Limbaugh’s “gut.” Republican contra-reality politics forced them to attack an empty chair fictional construct instead of the actual president, and it forced them to fabricate policies that simply didn’t exist (Jeep to China, welfare reform gutting, and so on). Great! Keep doing that. It failed. And when Republicans fail, it helps the rest of us.
But even the most sincere recommendations will fall on deaf ears anyway. The things they need to change the most are also threads that unite them. They believe women should be subjugated via anti-choice legislation and they will never abandon their abortion plank. They believe in supply-side, trickle down economics and nearly every sitting Republican politician has signed Grover Norquist’s tax pledge, so softening on tax hikes for the rich is definitely out. They can’t abandon their anti-immigration position or risk losing their angry, white, ignorant base who want nothing more than a return to the monochromatic 1950s Leave it to Beaver utopia — these same conservatives market in horror stories about savage brown people beheading decent law-abiding white people in the deserts of Arizona.
They’re trapped inside their own Mobius Loop of crapola and, honestly, I don’t know exactly how this trend will play out for them. Perhaps a coalition of moderate and liberal Republicans will splinter off, leaving the tea party wackaloons to their masochistic descent into political extinction.
I have no idea, but I certainly won’t be abandoning this topic anytime soon. Stay tuned.
Changing gears, how about some recommendations for liberal Democrats? What could we do as progressives to improve our station and to build our coalition through the second Obama term and beyond?
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/11/election-post-mortem-and-some-tough-love/
@jenestesdotcom:
Campaign ads? $752 million. Voting machines? $10 million. Not being able to buy an election? Priceless.
Picket Fence Apocalypse
By CHARLES M. BLOW
No, you cannot have your country back. America is moving forward.
That’s the message voters sent the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing Tuesday night when they re-elected President Obama and strengthened the Democrats’ control of the Senate.
No amount of outside money or voter suppression or fear mongering or lying — and there was a ton of each — was enough to blunt that message.
President Obama and his formidable campaign machine out-performed the Republicans, holding together a winning coalition that is the face of America’s tomorrow: young voters, urban voters, racially and ethnically diverse voters and women voters.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/picket-fence-apocalypse/?smid=tw-share
Demographic Shift Brings New Worry for Republicans
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/politics/obamas-victory-presents-gop-with-demographic-test.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
A couple of decades ago, Prince William County was one of the mostly white, somewhat rural, far-flung suburbs where Republican candidates went to accumulate the votes to win elections in Virginia.
Since then, Prince William has been transformed. Open tracts have given way to town houses and gated developments, as the county — about a half-hour south of Washington — has risen to have the seventh-highest household income in the country and has become the first county in Virginia where minorities make up more than half the population.
If Prince William looks like the future of the country, Democrats have so far developed a much more successful strategy of appealing to that future. On Tuesday, President Obama beat Mitt Romney by almost 15 percentage points in Prince William, nearly doubling George W. Bush’s margin over Al Gore in 2000, helping Mr. Obama to a surprisingly large victory in Virginia.
He did it not only by winning Hispanic voters, but also by winning strong majorities of the growing number of Asian-American voters and of voters under age 40. A version of his coalition in Virginia — a combination of minorities, women and younger adults — also helped Mr. Obama win Colorado, Nevada and perhaps Florida, which remained too close to call. He came close in North Carolina, a reliable state for Republican presidential nominees only a few years ago that he narrowly won in 2008.
Father First: Cute Daddy-Daughter Moment Caught on Camera During Obama’s Victory Speech
http://youtu.be/AOcGqtOSw_U
Election night was a pretty hectic night for me, so I imagine it was at least doubly so for President Obama.
That’s why it was particularly heartwarming to see this short but uniquely sweet exchange between the First Father and his First Daughter Sasha that took place just before the newly re-elected president delivered his acceptance speech.
As Obama stands on stage waving at his supporters, Sasha lightly taps on her dad and reminds him to show some love to the people behind him, which he immediately does.
It’s an ephemeral moment for sure, but a telling one.
http://gawker.com/5958818/
I love these girls… this family. Sasha is just that connected to her family and surroundings. So grounded and mature. Beautiful!
Official Wanda Sykes@iamwandasykes
Mittens met with his big donors. I hope that video shows up. I’m 147% sure that somebody said the n word.
Softer 3-strikes law has defense lawyers preparing case reviews
The process of asking California courts to revisit old sentences could take as long as two years and benefit roughly 3,000 prisoners.
By Jack Leonard and Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times
November 8, 2012
A day after California voted to soften its three-strikes sentencing law, defense lawyers around the state Wednesday prepared to seek reduced punishments for thousands of offenders serving up to life in prison for relatively minor crimes.
The process of asking courts to revisit old sentences could take as long as two years and benefit roughly 3,000 prisoners. They represent about a third of incarcerated third-strikers.
Proposition 36 garnered about 69% of the vote. The initiative won in all 58 counties, amending one of the nation’s toughest three-strikes laws, one that had overwhelming voter support when it was approved in 1994 amid heightened anxiety over violent crime.
“People want a fair and just criminal justice system,” said Michael Romano, who helped write the proposition and runs a Stanford Law School project that represents inmates convicted of minor third strikes. “The passage of Proposition 36, especially by its margin, has given some hope … to people behind bars who have been forsaken by their families and society.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-three-strikes-20121108,0,7054903.story
Bold New Republican Strategy
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Opting for a bold “big tent” strategy to rebuild the party, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told reporters today, “We need to welcome people who believe in different things than we do, like math and science.”
Read more at newyorker.com.
http://links.newyorker.mkt4334.com/ctt?kn=9&ms=NDg5MTU0MQS2&r=MjczNzc1MzAwMzUS1&b=0&j=Mjk0NTQ1NDU5S0&mt=1&rt=0
Major Republican Donors Face Billion Dollar Bust
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/gop-donors-2012_n_2090346.html#comments
Politico:
Big outside money fundamentally changed American politics in 2012 – just not the way the Republicans who planned a $1-billion blitz to defeat President Barack Obama wanted.
Ultimately, in fact, it may have hurt Republicans almost as much as it helped.
Gabrielle Giffords, Mark Kelly to confront gunman Jared Lee Loughner
By JONATHAN ALLEN | 11/7/12 7:02 PM EST
Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly will confront the man who put a bullet through her brain at his sentencing Thursday for a shooting rampage that left six people dead in Tucson, Ariz., in January 2011, a source close to the family confirmed.
Mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner struck a plea bargain with federal prosecutors in August that will spare his life, but is designed to ensure that he spends the rest of it behind bars
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83541.html#ixzz2Be4xuWWd
Morning Feature – An Open Letter to Angry White Men
The fear and anger felt by many white men in America is real, but the rest of us don’t want to oppress you. We just want to share in the dreams and promises of our wonderful nation. (More)
Dear Angry White Men,
You’re upset, and you see real reasons to be upset. I’ve spoken with hundreds of you over the past few months and years, and I hope we can stop yelling at each other and have real conversations. That would be better for all of us, and better for our nation.
I know you hate the phrases “white privilege” and “male privilege.” I understand that you don’t feel “privileged.” You scramble to keep or find a job and pay your bills as you remember stories about your fathers’ and grandfathers’ getting jobs and buying homes and raising kids and retiring, and you wonder if you’ll be able to do what they did. You see women and people of color get college or graduate school admissions, jobs, or promotions, and think you worked just as hard and deserved those slots just as much. You get handouts or lectures about campus or workplace diversity and sensitivity, but it seems like no one ever talks about the diversity of, or demands sensitivity to, white men.
Read more
http://bpicampus.com/2012/11/08/morning-feature-an-open-letter-to-angry-white-men/
Twitter alerts users to password security breach
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/11/08/twitter-password-third-party/1691461/
9:19AM EST November 8. 2012 – Twitter sent out e-mails to some of its users earlier today prompting them to reset their passwords because of possible security issues with third-party applications.
“Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter,” the e-mail says. “We’ve reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account.”
The e-mail includes a link that brings users to a password reset page, then prompts users to review their Applications and revoke access to any application that they don’t recognize.
TechCrunch reports that Twitter usually sends out these types of emails when a significant number of accounts are hacked. Many users have Tweeted about receiving the email or about having issues logging in to their accounts.
Twitter has not confirmed the size of the hack, but it told TechCrunch that users who have received the emails should reset their passwords from the link provided in the email or directly on Twitter.com.
I received an email from Twitter to reset my password. Hacking mofos!
So the WSJ thinks Mittens needed more $$$, and he would have won? SMGDH
How about MITT’S the LIAR, the GOP-BAGGERS, & the WSJ are living in a shitload of DENIAL
How Race Slipped Away From Romney
Election 2012
BY SARA MURRAY AND PATRICK O’CONNOR
BOSTON—Mitt Romney is one of the wealthiest men ever to run for president. And yet the lack of money earlier this year stalled his campaign, and he never really recovered.
The GOP nominee emerged late last spring from a long and bruising Republican primary season more damaged than commonly realized. His image with voters had eroded as he endured heavy attacks from Republicans over his business record. He also felt compelled to take a hard line on immigration—one that was the subject of debate among his advisers—that hurt his standing with Hispanic voters.
More than that, Mr. Romney had spent …
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324073504578105340729306074.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet
Every SINGLE drop of this:
y Bob Cesca: There’s been an understandable amount of discussion since Tuesday night about how the Republicans failed and what they can do to improve. I love a good concern-trolling post as much as anyone, especially in the wake of such an exhilarating victory.
Let’s face it, though. Do we sincerely want the Republicans to soften their regional white Christian epistemic self-marginalization?
Ultimately, Republican policies are misogynistic, bigoted, obsolete and ineffectual; their politics are toxic and exploitative; their media presence is a screechy echo-chamber of gibberish and conspiracy theories; and they’re rightly suffering the consequences of this deadly cocktail. If they’d prefer to self-destruct, fine. As such, they should stay away from Nate Silver’s wizardry and stick with Unskewed Polls and Rush Limbaugh’s “gut.” Republican contra-reality politics forced them to attack an empty chair fictional construct instead of the actual president, and it forced them to fabricate policies that simply didn’t exist (Jeep to China, welfare reform gutting, and so on). Great! Keep doing that. It failed. And when Republicans fail, it helps the rest of us.
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/11/election-post-mortem-and-some-tough-love/
Join me:
Thank you! Everything looks so delicious.
http://twitter.com/LiberalCanuck/status/266531479432093696/photo/1
LOL
http://twitter.com/amk4obama/status/266515193771745281/photo/1
Does Fox Help or Hurt the GOP?
by BooMan
Thu Nov 8th, 2012 at 08:23:42 AM EST
I consider Fox News to be a neurotoxin. Watching the network actually damages your brain and makes it harder to think clearly. This is mainly because it is designed to trigger emotional responses and to force you to make logical connections that don’t exist. It actively misinforms, but that’s not what does the brain damage. The damage is done by essentially un-teaching you how to think. However, it may be going too far to say that Fox News is killing the Republican Party. In some ways, the network is necessary to make the modern GOP possible. What would the Tea Party eruption have been without Fox News? And the 2010 midterms were the best election cycle for the Republicans in history.
More than anything else, Fox News acts as a gathering place for people of like mind. And those people are older, whiter, and more exurban and rural than the population as a whole. Fox helps them feel solidarity and gives them the sense that they are part of a movement. It gives them sources of outrage to organize around. And it has more legitimacy than talk radio both because it is on television and because it is treated no differently than CBS or ABC or CNN.
Of course, there are downsides to Fox News for the Republican Party. But I think those downsides are longer term. The network contributes to the radicalization of the GOP and makes it harder for moderates to cross the aisle and work constructively with Democrats. The way the network uses images of minorities to strike fear into their white audience contributes to the alienation of people of color from the Republican Party. And, ultimately, there has to be a price to be paid for making a huge segment of the American population stupid and misinformed. It’s a deal with the devil. You win an election today but you can’t govern effectively and wind up losing elections tomorrow.
Yet, on the whole, I don’t think the modern GOP could exist without Fox News. They couldn’t mobilize the support they have without the network.
http://www.boomantribune.com/
Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win
By Michael Scherer
Nov. 07, 2012
In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.
So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. “We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,” explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.
For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.
Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2BdpO5lGD
“The Nerdiest Election In The History Of The American Republic”
That’s what Ackerman calls it. Sasha Issenberg explains why the Democrats’ data operation excelled:
If Republicans brought consumer data into politics during Bush’s re-election, Democrats are mastering the techniques that give campaigns the ability to understand what actually moves voters. As a result, Democrats are beginning to engage a wider set of questions about what exactly a campaign is capable of accomplishing in an election year: not just how to modify nonvoters’ behavior to get them to the polls, but what exactly can change someone’s mind outside of the artificial confines of a focus group.
Michael Scherer has more details:
Rather than rely on outside media consultants to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the massive internal data sets. “We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, [here is] how to reach them,” said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: “On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently … to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters,” the same official said.
The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the President’s senior aides did not know about. “Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit?” an official asked rhetorically. “Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.”
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/
Short: Goeth where the people go.
November 07, 2012 10:33 AM
The Mystery of Why Republicans Were So Sure They’d Win
By Paul Glastris
Over the weekend, I had an extensive conversation with a longtime Republican operative, a veteran of three GOP White Houses, who insisted, despite all the poll data to the contrary, that Mitt Romney was poised to win, possibly by a big margin. I knew it was possible that he was spinning me, but the very real sense I got was that he was not, that he truly, honestly believed what he was saying.
Writing from Romney’s Boston campaign headquarters this morning, the Washington Examiner’s, Byron York makes clear that this willing suspension of disbelief was extremely common among members of the GOP.
A few hours earlier, across the street at the Convention Center, the campaign’s supporters and volunteers fully expected Romney to be the nation’s next president. Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were. Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.
“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff. I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.”
“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina. “It was just a very big surprise. We felt so confident.”
“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston. “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now. I really do.”
One of the more interesting questions of this election is how and why so many Republicans, who are certainly just as capable as Democrats at reading polls, chose to ignore the overwhelming statistical evidence that a Romney win was unlikely. I suppose one could say it is not much of a mystery, and that this mass refusal to accept politically inconvenient facts is of a piece with, say, conservative denial of global warming. And maybe that’s all it is. But I suspect that there was something else at play, too
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_11/the_mystery_of_why_republicans041022.php
The Greatness of Barack Obama Is Our Great Project
By Charles P. Pierce
at 3:07AM
There is a story that they tell in Georgia politics about the first time that Barack Obama was inaugurated as this most improbable president of the United States. Shortly before the ceremony, they say, he met with John Lewis, the congressman and American hero who was nearly beaten to death on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama as he marched to demand the right simply to vote. The two huddled in the corner and the president-elect wrote something on Lewis’s inaugural program. He walked away, and Lewis showed the program to the friends who had come with him.
“Because of you,” it said. “Barack Obama.”
Part of what drives people crazy about him — and if you wanted to see crazy, you should have seen the fugue state that overcame the Fox election all-stars last night, because I’ve seen jollier police lineups — is that he so clearly understands his own genuine historical stature, and that he wears it so easily, and that he uses it so deftly. It is not obvious. He does not use it brutally or obviously. It is just… there with him, a long and deep reservoir of violence and sorrow and tragedy and triumph out of which comes almost everything he does. He came into this office a figure of history, unlike anyone who’s become president since George Washington. The simple event of him remains a great gravitational force in our politics. It changes the other parts of our politics in their customary orbits. It happens so easily and so in the manner of an immutable physical law that you hardly notice that it has happened until you realize that what you thought you knew about the country and its people had been shifted by degrees until it is in a completely different place.
Change, he talks about.
Change is the force around him when he walks into the room.
But the history that propels him is not the history that many of us learned in school. It is the underground history of the country, buried deep in the earth, over and over again, but stubbornly rising, over and over again, until it gathered all of its momentum behind him and made him the event that he was in 2008 and that he remains today. It was the history that was behind John Lewis as he walked over that bridge. It is the history that was behind him in his first campaign and then, rather late in the day, in his second campaign as well. And it is through him, maybe, that the underground history is fully integrated at last into the history of the country, that it is acknowledged at last as what it always has been — an important element to be used in the constant re-creation of our political commonwealth. He as much as said so late last night, pushing toward two in the morning.
“The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote,” he said, calling, again, for the country to engage fully in “the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on.” That underground history that is behind him, the history that he wears so easily and wields so subtly, ultimately is a history of an ongoing demand to be included in the creative project of self-government. That was all the civil-rights movement ever was. That was what all the bloodshed and horror and death and glory were all about. It was a demand to be included in the great project simply because, if some Americans were not included in the project, it never was so great in the first place.
In terms of pure politics, he ran a great campaign. He was strongest as his voice weakened. He plays to the final whistle. He is, as Jimmy Breslin once put it about someone else, a terribly fierce fifteen-round fighter. There was something undeniably elegaic about his last round of speeches, in Florida and in Wisconsin and in Iowa, where it all started four years ago. There was a sense of the great unspooling of time and history, a sense that the beginning of the end of his moment had come upon him. But, even then, amid all the emotion, he found a very hard place from which to throw the last few punches. You know where I stand. You know what I believe. You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say. It was a combination, right-left-right, and he threw it all the way to last bell. And, in the end, it was more than enough.
Nothing became Willard Romney’s campaign like the ending of it. His concession speech was simple, almost perfunctory. Best wishes to the president and his family. A nod to some staffers. A blessing bestowed upon Paul Ryan even though the zombie-eyed granny-starver brought almost nothing to the ticket. “The election is over,” he said, “but our principles endure.” And then he was gone, as vague and evanescent a figure as he always was, a strange and out-of-focus politician who surrounded himself with a baffling opacity that, within six months, I predict we will barely remember his campaign at all. He does not wear history as well as does the man who defeated him because history has not surrounded and powered his every public moment. That is a deficit he never could overcome.
The creative project of self-government — hard and frustrating but necessary — is to produce that political commonwealth that changes over time, that can change sometimes by the minute, if circumstances intervene. This whole campaign has been a referendum on that project, as though the political commonwealth were a sewer bond or a school construction bill that was submitted to the voters for their approval. That was the entire campaign. That was the issue underlying all the others. That was the fight that Romney and his party quite deliberately picked, reckoning that we had tired of all that hard and frustrating but necessary work the project involved. That was the question that was settled so definitively last night.
The long creative project of America has been to engage all its citizens in that work. That is the history that he wears so well, and that he wields so subtly. That is the truth that he represents. That is the great silent thing that has been there through all the debates, and the ads, and all of that preposterous money. We are working on ourselves. We are incomplete. We are never finished. Elections come and go. The political commonwealth is a work in progress. We work with the tools that time and circumstance provide. As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/barack-obama-2012-14524219#ixzz2BdnFPo2e
I <3 Charles Pierce!
http://youtu.be/pRv65VvuiOs
Evolution is a thing
By Will Femia
Thu Nov 8, 2012 1:00 AM EST
Ohio really did go to the president last night.
And he really did win.
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 skewed to over-sample Democrats.
And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election
To make conservatives feel bad.
He 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 no one is taking away anyone’s guns.
And taxes haven’t gone up.
And the deficit is dropping, actually.
And Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.
And the moon landing was real.
And FEMA isn’t building concentration camps.
And UN election observers aren’t taking over Texas.
And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry
And the financial services industry
Are not the same thing as communism.
Listen.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/
LOL Maddow realy did paint the ALTERNATE UNIVERSE that these fearful Lil creatins live in.
Maddow’s opening segment was sober on what we chose when we voted for the President.
Whew….Willard would have been as bad as we thought he’d be
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#49736294
Barack Obama And The Death Of Normal
America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.
You want to lead in America? Find a way to be entirely utilitarian — to address the most problems on behalf of the most possible citizens. That works. That matters. Last night, it mattered just enough to overcome the calcified political calculations of men who think that 47 percent will vote against them because they are victims, or that 53 percent are with them because the rest of us vote only from self-interest and without regard for the republic as a whole. It was a closer contest than common sense and the spirit of a truly great nation should dictate. But unless these white guys who have peddled “normal” for so long — normal as in racial majority, normal as in religious majority, normal as in sexual orientation — unless they have a hard moment of self-reflection and self-awareness, well, it will not be this close again.
……………………………………………
Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else.
http://davidsimon.com/inevitabilities-and-barack-obama/
Breaking: Arizona Outrage Over Unprecedented Provisional Ballot Mayhem; Record Latino Vote Marred
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-biggers/breaking-arizona-outrage-_b_2090237.html
Move over, Ohio.
Despite record early voting ranks among Latinos, Arizona took a giant step ahead of the nation into the quagmire of provisional and early ballot mayhem, as outraged Latino voters and allies converged on the Maricopa County Tabulation Election Center in Phoenix today, demanding clarification and proper counting of unprecedentedly massive numbers of uncounted ballots that could potentially affect the outcome of the high profile races of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and U.S. Senate candidate Richard Carmona, among others.
Winning 465, 249 votes from nearly 96 percent of precincts reporting last night, Arpaio reportedly defeated challenger Paul Penzone by nearly 10 percent. With 99.76 percent of the precincts reporting, Republican Jeff Flake reportedly defeated Carmona for the U.S. Senate, 809,283 votes to 725,831.
But that’s not the end of the story.
While estimates of uncounted provisional and returned early ballots vary wildly — from 150,00 to more than 400,000 in Maricopa County alone, and thousands more across the state — many Arizonans are now questioning the extraordinary levels of provisional ballots issued, and numerous voters have emerged with stories of undue barriers and difficulties at the polls for Latino voters.
“We have examples of newly naturalized citizens who registered to vote only to find out a few days before the election that they were not on the voter list,” Randy Parraz, President of Citizens for a Better Arizona, noted. “We have examples of others who were deemed to be age ineligible and left off the voter list but who were in fact 18 and over. We have many citizens who requested a ballot in the mail and never received it.”
“This is a travesty, not just for the Latino community in Maricopa County,” Petra Falcon, Executive Director of Promise Arizona in Action, said in a statement, “but for every voter in Arizona, and for every American who believes in democracy.”
Too cute!!!!!!!!!!!
ADORABLE!!
Too cool for school! Watch out mom & dad, this lil lady is gonna break some hearts and walk with a mountain of SMARTS!
Good Morning, Chics!
Good Morning, SG2, Ametia and Everyone!
Good Morning, Ladies & Everyone! :-)
The dancer is beautiful. She dances with feeling and brings the energy. You can see at the 47 second mark…the guy is into the music and dance. She has gotten to him.
Whew! Got in a good workout with the “Eskista” this morning. Loving the series, SG2.