The Real-Life John Galt

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the story of John Galt, a titan of industry who refuses to be exploited by the tyranny of a government that taxes him too much. President Obama's reelection has purportedly prompted a real-life John Galt to action, in the person of Robert E. Murray, CEO of Murray Energy.

The day after the election Murray read a prayer in front of staff members and fired 150 workers from two of his coal mines because, he says, Obama will destroy the coal industry. (The fictional John Galt is an atheist, by the way.) But the fact is, Murray's coal mines are losing money not because of taxation and environmental regulation, but because his filthy and inefficient nineteenth-century product is losing market share to a much cleaner and more efficient twentieth-century product.

Many companies have force-fed employees pro-Romney propaganda in this election cycle, a tactic Romney promoted. Other CEOs besides Murray threatened to fire workers if Obama won, though it's not clear how many have carried through. One nameless Las Vegas businessman claims to have done so, but David Siegel, the Florida timeshare billionaire who threatened mass firings, has instead given employees a raise.

Murray, however, delivered on his threat. He has long used the threat of firings to blackmail employees to donate to Republicans. He set up a PAC and "encouraged" employees to contribute to it with payroll deductions, which have totaled $1.4 million since 2007.  The tactic is a nifty way to get around campaign finance laws, which limit how much money Murray can personally give to candidates. Murray is also the CEO who shut down a mine in Ohio and forced employees to attend a Mitt Romney speech without pay. Not all employees donate voluntarily:

The Murray sources, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, came forward separately. But they painted similar pictures of the fund-raising operation. “There’s a lot of coercion,” says one of them. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.” Says the second: “They will give you a call if you’re not giving. . . . It’s expected you give Mr. Murray what he asks for.”

Murray Energy is in financial trouble, to be sure, but it's not because of excessive regulation or any "war on coal." It's due to competition from cheap, clean-burning natural gas obtained from fracking.

As I've written before, the price of gas has been so low recently that energy companies are losing their shirts, according to none other than the head of Exxon, Rex Tillerson.

Because of that, more and more utilities are turning to natural gas turbines instead of coal-fired power plants. Natural gas is cheaper and safer to produce, easier to use, more flexible, and cleaner. It can generate electricity, heat homes and cook food. It doesn't cause mercury pollution or acid rain. It emits less CO2 per kilowatt hour produced. It's more easily transported through pipelines or in liquid form. It doesn't produce filthy coal slurry that poisons rivers and streams, as has happened at least seven times with Murray's coal operations. It doesn't leave toxic clinkers after burning. Coal mining requires miners to work in filthy conditions a mile underground, or decapitate entire mountaintops to expose coal seams. Natural gas turbines can be turned off and on almost at will, and don't have long startup times like coal-fired plants. And gas turbines use much less water than coal to produce the same amount of electricity, which is important as the nation is still in the grip of a drought with no end in sight.

By switching electricity generation from coal to natural gas the United States has reduced CO2 emissions to what they were 20 years ago.

I'll be the first to admit that natural gas fracking has its problems. In their rush to exploit the new technology many operators have taken shortcuts that have spilled toxic fracking fluids, polluted groundwater and even caused earthquakes. But by slowing down, developing better regulations and licensing only conscientious operators, the problems with fracking can be minimized, all while making natural gas profitable again. And of course, we should be working hard on developing twenty-first century technologies that eliminate the problems of fracking.

But instead of acknowledging the reality of technological and competitive forces that have undermined his antiquated business model, Murray blames his losses on the president and the laws that keep Americans safe and healthy.

It's a blatantly dishonest bait-and-switch argument by a greedy coward. And that's all these John Galt wannabes really are.

A Sunday Dedication

Today I am thinking about Army Cpl. Andrew Wilfahrt who died on Feb. 27, 2011, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when an improvised explosive device blew his 31-year-old body apart. Andrew was gay and DADT  hadn't quite been repealed when he slipping the surly bonds of earth on that day. But it was soon after.

Andrew was from Minnesota and the election last Tuesday also saw a defeat the marriage amendment. I can't think of a better way to honor his memory than to have hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans stand up and say no to something that would have limited individual rights.

Rights that he died defending.

Though you have made me see troubles, many and bitter, you will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth you will again bring me up. You will increase my honor and comfort me once again. (Psalm 71:20-21)

Still Missing the Point

Tuesday's election results have conservative Christians wondering what went wrong, with Romney losing and so many states embracing gay marriage:

“Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in,” R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. “It’s not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn’t get out. It did get out.

“It’s that the entire moral landscape has changed,” he said. “An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them.”

These guys are still missing the point. The problem is not that everyone who voted against them rejects their moral positions. We just believe it's wrong for religious groups to use the power of state and federal government to force their moral beliefs on the whole of society. That "we" includes atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Democrats and even libertarian Republicans.

Personally, I think it's best for kids to have a father and a mother who are married. Alcohol and marijuana are a stupid waste of money, time and brain cells. Anal sex can spread venereal disease, hepatitis and E. coli infections. Oral sex is unsanitary and disgusting. Cheating on your spouse is wrong. I would never encourage my wife or sister to have an abortion. But these things, done properly, are not automatically detrimental to society or the people who do them


Though the folks bemoaning their losses on Tuesday refuse to acknowledge it, their campaign to legislate their beliefs on abortion, gay marriage, contraception and other sexual practices is no different than the Taliban enforcing strict Sharia law in Afghanistan.

Once we go back down the road of legislating religious morality, eventually that power will be used to undermine other religions, even those that currently consider themselves to be allies in the fight against gay marriage. After all, just 50 years ago many believed John Kennedy's Catholicism disqualified him to be president.

People came to this country to escape the endless bloodshed that swept Europe in the pogroms of Christians against Jews, Catholic inquisitions against heretics, and wars between Protestants and Catholics.

And it's why the First Amendment was added first.

They Have Been Failing You

One of the main "story behind the story" bits of this election was how the conservative media completely failed. Dick Morris predicting a landslide? Karl Rove whining to the other Fox anchors about how we shouldn't rush to judgment on Ohio, even though their guys in the backroom just called it? It was really a sad thing to watch.

Conor Fridersdorf pretty much nailed it.

Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, "What went wrong?", they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: "Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?"

Because they live in a bubble.

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thinking; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

But guess what? You haven't just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven't tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they've done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election.

So why do you keep putting up with them?

My only hope now is that readers of Kevin Baker's site (and other right wing blogs) will realize that all the talk of impending Armageddon is failing them as well.

Amnesty Amnesia

The day after the election I opined that demographic shifts would require the Republicans to change their policies in order to remain politically viable. The shift took exactly one day, and on Thursday Republican pundits began to concur with my analysis in droves.  Sean Hannity endorsed immigration amnesty. Charles Krauthammer, in a piece in the Washington Post, wrote:

[Hispanics] should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example).

The principal reason they go Democratic is the issue of illegal immigrants. In securing the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney made the strategic error of (unnecessarily) going to the right of Rick Perry. Romney could never successfully tack back.

For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement.

This sounds reasonable enough. But it's going to be hard for the Republican Party to do a full 180 on amnesty, because it's more than just changing a bullet point in a party platform.

For decades Republicans have depended on the Southern Strategy for victory. That strategy, often credited to Richard Nixon, involves stoking racial prejudice among certain southern whites. Prior to the 1960s the south was reliably Democratic (because Republicans were the party of Lincoln), but by using racist code words and "dog whistles" like "states rights" Nixon was able to end the Democratic Party's hold on the Solid South. Reagan did the same in the 1980s, when he talked about "welfare queens." Romney was still doing it when he said "Obama gutted welfare reform."

But over time, with increasingly positive images of blacks in popular culture (Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Halle Berry, Will Smith, Ice Tea), and the total devotion to hip hop by white teens, African Americans were becoming more mainstream and non-threatening. Conservative blacks like Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain and Alan West further eroded the efficacy of the Southern Strategy.

So, in the 2000s Republicans morphed the Southern Strategy into anti-immigrant and anti-Latino sentiments. These foreign invaders who can't even speak English are stealing our jobs! Never mind that we would never consider doing those jobs ourselves because they are too dangerous, or back-breaking, or degrading and don't pay enough.

In states like Arizona, Georgia, and Mississippi, Republican state legislatures have enacted (or tried to enact) tough new immigration laws, intruding into questionable legal territory. The Republican Party embraced these attitudes nationally, leaving only a few outliers like Rick Perry. Mitt Romney, whose own Mormon church has a long history of racism, tore into Perry for breaking the party line on immigration.

Now, the people persuaded by the Southern Strategy are not some abstract them situated south of the Mason-Dixon line. They include my dad, who lives in Minnesota. When my sister M got engaged to a Hispanic American my dad disowned her. When my sister S went to M's wedding in Texas, he refused to speak to S for years. When my sister J's daughter, N, got pregnant by a Latino boyfriend, my father had a two-fer: he disowned them both.

I am therefore one of the millions of people who are directly affected by this stupid, senseless and divisive racism that the Republican Party has been perpetuating and exploiting to their political advantage for decades.


And the word that most disgusts my father, the word that caused him to despise John McCain as much as he loathed Ted Kennedy? Amnesty.

How are people like my dad going to react to a Republican Party that embraces amnesty for illegal immigrants, in what is undeniably an openly cynical political ploy just to gain more votes? Republicans like Mitt Romney and the Heritage Foundation invented the health care insurance mandate, but as soon as Obama accepted the compromise that included it, they decreed the mandate to be the end of freedom and democracy.

Will people like my father develop instant amnesty amnesia on command from the Republican Party, like they forgot that they supported the health care mandate? Or are their attitudes on race so deeply ingrained that they will stay home on election day? I'm sure Krauthammer thinks that since they have nowhere else to go, they'll just blindly continue voting Republican.

But is Krauthammer right in blithely assuming that my dad is a Republican patsy who will sit down, shut up and do what he's told? Or will people like my dad join third parties and vote for candidates like George Wallace, as my dad did in 1968?

In other words, is the Republican coalition of big business, stubborn tribal whites, NRA gun enthusiasts and anti-abortion and anti-gay crusaders about to come apart?

A Gerrymandered Mandate

Republicans love to talk up their "mandate" when Republicans win, and deny that Democrats have one when Democrats win.

So it is this year. Republicans say President Obama's victory is no mandate because he only won 50.4% to 48% of the popular vote. In the electoral college the difference is much more marked. If Florida is decided for Obama he'll win 332-206 (or 303-235 if Florida goes to Romney).

When George Bush "won" in 2000 he actually lost the popular vote 47.9% to Gore's 48.4%. Electorally he barely squeaked by, winning 271-266, and doing that only because the Supreme Court stepped in with a 5-4 decision to prevent Florida from conducting a recount. Yet Republicans claimed a huge mandate for their programs of military spending increases and tax cuts for the wealthy.

When George Bush won in 2004 he took the popular vote by 50.7% to Kerry's 48.3%, with a 286-251 electoral advantage, a lead that hinged on Ohio which had very serious irregularities in the computer voting system built by Diebold, a company with ties to the Republican Party. Republicans again claimed a huge mandate for Bush.

When Barack Obama won in 2008 he won the popular vote by 52.9% to McCain's 45.7%, with a 365-173 electoral shellacking. Yet Republicans claimed that Obama had no mandate whatsoever, that he was wrong to pursue the stimulus programs and the health care and financial reforms he promised during the election and that he was too "partisan."

Republicans say Obama's 2012 victory is not a mandate because it's the worst performance a sitting president ever had, because he "only" beat Romney 50.4% to 48%, or a margin of 2.4%. This is a lie of course: Bush beat Kerry by the identical 2.4% margin in 2004.  And they somehow forget that George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton. 

Now some Republicans are saying voters gave them a mandate for lower taxes by returning Republicans to the House. This is completely false.

Republicans kept the House because congressional districts across the country are gerrymandered so that incumbents retain their seats. The gerrymandering lock was strengthened in this cycle because Republicans held so many state legislatures after the 2010 census when the entire country was redistricted. That situation has already been reversed in Minnesota, which gave Democrats commanding majorities in both houses of the legislature on Tuesday. But redistricting allowed Michele Bachmann to keep her seat this year; she won by a mere 4,207 votes while outspending her Democratic challenger 12 to 1. Most of the $23 million she spent on the campaign was raised from contributors outside Minnesota.

Because of the way congressional districts are gerrymandered, a status quo House result doesn't tell us what "the people" really want. You have to look at the results a little more closely. The fact is, six Tea Party House freshmen in swing districts lost their bids for reelection. Tea Party rape fantasizers Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost their Senate bids in Indiana and Missouri, which should have been gimmes for Republicans. Barack Obama won the presidency. And Democrats held on to the Senate, even though 21 of the 33 Democratic seats were up for election.


The election definitely tilted in favor of the Democrats, but the only mandate they have from "the people" is that they do their jobs, come to a reasonable accommodation with the Republicans and get the economy moving again. The mandate for the Republicans is the same, with additional provisos that they stop sabotaging all legislation and appointments, and abandon their tactic of running out the political clock in the vain hope of some Rovian electoral magic in 2016.

Perhaps it will be easier for Republicans now that their number one priority is no longer making sure Barack Obama is a one-term president.

What Needs To Done?

If there is one thing that has left a very bad taste in my mouth about the election this year, it's the low voter turnout. As of this post, we are over 10 million short of the last election. I realize that 2008 was an historic election but I feel an enormous amount of dismay at the fact that out of the 210 million or so people that are eligible to vote, only 120 million voted (130 in the last election).

Folks, this sucks. What needs to be done to get those extra 90 million people in the voting booth?

Was Hurricane Sandy God's Vote for Obama?

Republicans love to invoke God's will at the slightest hint of meteorological catastrophe. For people like Pat Robertson, every flood, drought, hurricane and tornado is evidence of God's displeasure with a gay pride parade or an abortion clinic.

Karl Rove said that Hurricane Sandy was Obama's October Surprise, and Dick Morris blamed the hurricane and Chris Christie for Obama's victory.

But would God really hammer millions of people on the east coast, in mostly Democratic states, merely to drive home the point that the country would be better off with a Democrat running FEMA? Or was God punishing those Democrats with a hurricane, hoping that the infrastructure in the cities would be destroyed and urban dwellers wouldn't be able to cast their votes, allowing rural and suburban Republicans in those states to stage an electoral coup and win one for the Mitter?

If so, God would be guilty of the largest election tampering scheme in history, dwarfing the fevered Republican dreams of ACORN operatives running around impersonating dead people at the polls. Since natural disasters hurt everyone equally, perhaps the right will stop pretending that God actually has anything to do with them. After all, if God has been siccing earthquakes and hurricanes on us lo these many millennia, he's the largest mass murderer in the history of the world.

Now, I'd be the first to agree that Chris Christie threw Mitt Romney under the bus when Hurricane Sandy hit. Christie was never enthusiastic about Romney, whom he barely mentioned when he addressed the Republican national convention in August. But the truth is, no Republican wanted Romney: he was everyone's third or fourth choice, even among other money men like Sheldon Adelson. Most Republicans would have preferred someone like Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, but they knew the rest of the electorate considers those guys to be incompetent or nuts. So they settled on the guy who likes like a generic Central Casting president.

Besides, what's good for Chris Christie is not what's good for Mitt Romney. First and foremost, Christie needs to make sure his state recovers from the hurricane. Second, Christie is governor of a mostly Democratic state, and he needs to work with Democrats (something Romney might appreciate). Third, Christie may have presidential aspirations, and a Romney presidency would effectively close him out of the running in 2016.

But despite any cynical speculation about Christie's motives for embracing Obama after the hurricane, putting our differences aside and working together to make this country better is the right thing to do. Partisans like Rove and Morris complain bitterly about Christie, but that's what the people of this country want to see. Even John Boehner is also making some encouraging statements, in his own gruff way.

If guys like Chris Christie can lead the Republican Party out of the wilderness and back into the light, more power to him.

The Times, They Are a-Changin'

For years it's been obvious that long-term demographics predict the demise of the Republican Party as currently constituted. The question has been when that would kick in. Now we have the answer: 2012.

President Obama won reelection largely on the strength of support from women, minority and younger voters. Those voters turned out for him in droves in 2008, and the question was whether that could be sustained.

Many commentators talk about how Obama "lost" the white vote, implying that there was some kind of racial bias of whites against the president. I'm not so sure. The president won in "white" states like Minnesota and Wisconsin (Paul Ryan didn't even pull in his own state). Yes, some whites who voted for the president in 2008 didn't vote for him this time around. That would have happened to any president faced with an obstinate Congress and the lackluster recovery, regardless of race.

But racial (and sexual) politics does have a lot to do with why Romney, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lost. The Republican Party banked on conservative religious folks to win the election for them. But the social tide is turning: gay marriage was approved in three states, and Minnesota voted down a constitutional amendment to ban it.

In Minnesota Republicans controlling both houses of the legislature did an end-around the governor to put an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot, hoping that it would fire up turnout among Catholics and religious conservatives. That tactic backfired. Instead, young people came out in droves to vote against it and a voter suppression bill that would have disenfranchised both younger and elderly voters. And at the same time they elected significant Democratic majorities in both houses.

Now, I'll be the first to say that this demographic shift does not mean the Democratic Party has a permanent lock on the electorate. The Republican Party can stage a comeback if they drop racially motivated policies on immigration, stop opposing gay marriage and military service, and stop incessantly attacking the reproductive rights of women.

It's doubtful they'll do all these at once. Because they're so dependent on the the religious right for turnout they'll most likely stop opposing immigration reform first, hoping that they'll be able to peel off conservative Hispanic Catholics. This will alienate many of the racially motivated Southern whites, but since they have nowhere else to go it's a safe bet. Immigration reform will also please business-oriented Republicans who've been clamoring for more cheap foreign labor to help bust the unions.

It's hard to see how the Republicans can back down on abortion and gay marriage at this point; they've been dependent on conservative Catholics for the last several elections. But since Catholics generally are more sympathetic to Democratic policies of justice and social welfare, any Republican retreat on those issues will cede the field completely.

But continued opposition to gay rights will inevitably cost them the support of libertarians and younger generations. For that reason, Republicans will ultimately have to drop opposition to gay marriage and military service.

In the end the money men like Mitt Romney, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers will decide the direction the Republican Party will take. Romney has shown he will take any position on social issues he needs to win. Adelson and the Kochs want results, and if that means jettisoning the conservative social agenda they'll do it.

Cynicism aside, I would love for the Republican Party to make these changes. I used to be a Republican myself. I want to again be able to vote for candidates based on their individual qualifications, rather than voting against them because of their lockstep devotion to their party's narrow self-serving agenda.

Six Billion Dollars Down the Drain

It looks like we spent at least $6 billion on this election, and nothing really changed. We've got the same president, the same House and the same Senate. And that $6 billion doesn't even count an unknowable amount of "dark money" spent to influence the election, but estimates are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of that money was spent on countless misleading TV ads. Shouldn't we be spending our money on something more constructive, instead of giving it to the lamestream media to harangue us with stuff no one wants to see?

The Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision may be catastrophically wrong, but because of that there's little to be done to directly limit the amount of money being spent. What we can do is require more openness in the process: all ad buys should be reported on the web within 24 hours and dark money "social welfare" groups should be required to disclose all large donors on the web.

ProPublica has been working on a series of stories about dark money organizations. The weirdest part of the story is that they found a bunch of financial documents for one of these "social welfare" organizations in a meth house in Colorado. The documents seem to show coordination between Montana political campaigns and Western Tradition Partners (WTP), a dark money organization. Such coordination is illegal even under Citizen's United.

Without full disclosure of donors to such organizations it has become obvious that we cannot meet the Citizen's United's low standard. WTP's shenanigans show how easily the current system could be corrupted, or at least present the appearance of corruption.

If we know who's behind these ads then we can make a better decision about the reliability of the message, and hold them responsible for their actions.

The Day After

What a night.

To be honest, I was so overwhelmed by everything last evening that I just couldn't post anything. So, today, here are my thoughts.

The president's reelection is significant for several reasons. First, it essentially made Citizen's United irrelevant which is a good thing. Old, rich, white douches spent millions to get rid of him and it didn't work...which brings me to my second thing. Folks, the country has changed and the GOP better get with the program. They can start by chucking the American Taliban element of their party (which has now cost them the Senate...again!) and focus on the rising demographic of Latinos. The hard line on immigration won't cut it anymore and they are going to have to change. The Andy Griffith Show America (which never existed in the first place) is gone.

In fact, the hard line on many things are going to have to change...gay marriage (past in three states yesterday and a ban defeated in my home state), women's reproductive rights (no more old white men with two dollar haircuts talking about rape) and an acceptance that people do want some form of federal government. The most important thing of all they are going to have to realize is this country is diverse and, if they are going to survive as a party, they need to embrace this.

Mitt Romney lost because he was an Etch-A-Sketch candidate. He took these hard line positions, realized he would get walloped in the general if he didn't moderate and then proceeded to be on three sides of every policy point. I am very thankful we did not elect this man. He may have had principles at one time but not any longer. As Erick Erickson said, he would do or say anything to get elected.

Younger voters...the ones that supposedly weren't going to turn out...did so in greater numbers than in 2008 (by one percentage point). This brings up my message today to some of my posters and other friends: GET OUT OF THE FUCKING BUBBLE. Stop reading the Drudge report, watching Fox news, and frequenting right wing blogs. The things they say are happening simply don't exist in reality. No problem if you want to continue to play make believe but I would hope that this election has starkly illustrated that these folks are lying and the American people now know it.

This new certainty was a long haul. Most liberals and Democrats feel a profound sense of doubt and insecurity (preyed upon by the Right) after 2000 and 2004. Now that we will four Democratic won elections to the GOP's 2 in the last 20 years to the executive branch, that doubt BS is fucking over. The Democrats have built a powerful coalition that can continually get over 300 EVs with a good candidate. The GOP hasn't done that since 1988. Perhaps they need to finally realized that they can't be the party of old, white men any longer.

I was happy to see pot made legal in three states...fire up the bong!

Gay marriage was also made legal in three states (Maine, Maryland, and Washington). It's only a matter of time for the rest of the nation.

Looks like my predictions for the Senate were accurate. They haven't called it for Tester and Heitkamp yet but they are both ahead. 55-45, with the two I's caucusing with the Dems.

As I suspected in the House, the Dems will pick up a couple of seats but still stay under 200.

Elizabeth Warren takes back the Kennedy seat....hands down, one of the best moments of the night.

In my home state, Michele won again, just like I said she would. Oh well. It will be nice to have her around to say moonbat shit and win more elections for the Democrats. Both the gay marriage ban and the voter ID amendment were defeated. Better, the Democrats took back the State House and Senate and we have an all blue state for at least two years. This is another great example of how the Right fucks everything up in going to far over to their side of the field.

It looks like Tea Party favorites Joe Walsh and Allen West will be sent packing (the latter's race hasn't been called but Murphy is ahead). That, along with the loss of both of the Rape Boys (Todd Akin and Richard Murdock) begs the question: is the Tea Party dead? I think this election says that it is. They might still be able  to win some House seats here and there but not the Senate nor the presidency. That's what happens when you are obsessed with ideological purity, see compromise as weakness, have a fundamental belief in scriptural literalism, deny science, are unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, have a hostile fear of progress, demonize education, have a need to control women's bodies, have severe Xenophobia, have a tribal mentality, are intolerant of dissent, and have a pathological hatred of the US government.

You lose election after election.

So what will the president's second term look like? Well, if I were him, I'd play hardball. He was more weight in the Senate now and a few more seats in the House. I'd reach out to the moderate GOP folks in the House and get a grand bargain on our government's finances. Hopefully some of them have seen the writing the wall: moderate or else. I'd also look to move on immigration, climate change, and education. What's going to be fun about this second term is that now the president doesn't have to worry about reelection. He can get to work on those issues he really wanted to tackled from the first term but couldn't because of how long health care took.

We are going to get see what the president really wants now for the country, unfiltered and backed by political capital. I know this makes the Right shit themselves but when the economy starts to improve, they aren't going to be able to say much. Perhaps they'll admit they were wrong.

It sure would be nice.

2012 Election Predictions

Well, I suppose it's that time for me to make my final predictions for tomorrow. First up, the presidential election.

President Obama will win 303 electoral votes to Romney's 235 electoral votes. The states that Romney will take back from the Obama 2008 victory will be Indiana (obviously), North Carolina (very much more than likely) and Florida. With that last one, I'm going to have a caveat and that's this recent report from the Times.

The lawsuit was filed after a stream of complaints from voters who sometimes waited nearly seven hours to vote or who did not vote at all because they could not wait for so long to do so.

Seven hours? I thought turnout for the Obama side was going to be low. I can't quite bring myself to say that Florida will go for Obama, even though Nate Silver has it at 46% chance that we will win it, but the momentum there has shifted to the president over the last week and he might eke it out. With Silver showing the popular vote to be 49.9 Romney, Obama 46.9 anything is possible but I'm sticking with no Florida for the president. I just don't feel it.

The Senate will hold for the Democrats largely because of the Tea Party and their purity tests. It doesn't help that they seem to want to nominate old, white men with two dollar haircuts who like to talk about rape (and people wonder why we call them the American Taliban.) I think they Dems are actually going to gain two seats (on Obama's coattails in the deep blue states) and we will be at 55-45 (with Angus King caucusing with the Dems). Winners (from the Swing States): Tester, McCaskill, Donnelly, Heller, Fischer, Flake, Heitkamp, Warren, Murphy, Kaine, Baldwin and Brown. I'd say that's pretty great considering that they really had no chance earlier in the year. Carmona might have had a chance in Arizona but then he showed that he has the same attitude about women that Todd Akin and Richard Murock have.

The House will not be kind for the Democrats. Up until last week, I thought the would pick up around 12-15 seats. Now, I think it will be around 5. Guys like Joe Walsh in Illinois will go because Tammy Duckworth rocks the shizzle but many of the other candidates just don't have the power to upset guys like Steve King from Iowa. And, though I am loathe to admit it, Michele Bachmann will win her seat in MN-6 again. The media has said it's tight but it's not at all, folks. The people up there are hard right wing and will never vote for Democrat even if their lives depended on it (actually, they do, but we've been over this ground before:)) Final tally? 237 Rs, 198 Ds.

For my own home state, we have two ballot issues. The first is the Double Secret Anti-Fag Protection amendment that says that marriage should be only between one man and one woman. I think it will be defeated as I know many Republicans (including the ever venerable last in line) who will be voting NO. The second ballot issue is the Photo ID amendment and I think it will pass, although it will be struck down at the State Supreme Court as being in violation of the US Constitution.

As will likely be the case, feel free to ignore all of my accurate predictions and act like a 12 year old boy on the ones I get wrong:)

The Republican Mafia

Paul Ryan was in my state the other day, saying that a Romney administration will be bipartisan. The statement is preposterous on the face of it, given how inflexibly partisan and doctrinaire most of the Republicans in Congress have been for the last four years. Most of those who actually did have bipartisan tendencies have been summarily executed by Tea Party hacks during the 2012 primaries.


Congressional Republicans' only goal, stated by Jim DeMint, was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president. Under his leadership Republicans sabotaged nearly all action in the Senate by threatening filibusters on nearly every piece of legislation and appointment except for a brief seven-week period between the time that Al Franken was seated on July 7, 2009, and Ted Kennedy died on August 25.

The health care bill, which Obama compromised on in order to get Republican support, was passed in that brief window. It was based on Romney's Massachusetts health care plan, a plan the Republican Heritage Foundation put forth. Yet most Republicans obstinately refused even to negotiate and have been trying to destroy it ever since in order to peevishly deny Obama a victory. After vowing to party faithful for years to dismantle Obamacare in its entirety, "more-moderate-just-in-time-for-the-election" Romney is now saying that he would keep all the good stuff, but get rid of the mechanism that pays for it. Which Romney knows would gut it, leaving millions without health insurance.

Obama spent months and months trying to elicit Republican compromise. He was rejected on almost every point by Republicans like Ryan who insisted not only on keeping the Bush tax cuts--cuts that were intentionally made temporary to obscure their true long-term cost--but demanded even greater tax cuts for the wealthy. This despite a mammoth deficit caused by fighting in two wars on credit. The tax cuts and wars alone gave us the biggest deficit ever, and was made even worse when the economy collapsed after the banks screwed us over and Bush bailed them out. Obama compromised with the Republicans on the bailout while still a senator.

But when it came time to compromise with Obama over the debt ceiling, House Republicans instead chose to behave like Mexican and Colombian drug gangs who kidnap innocent victims for ransom, and held the country hostage with their demands for huge tax cuts for the wealthy. Their refusal resulted in a sequester agreement that was supposed to be too terrible for anyone to contemplate, yet Republicans continue to this day to demand more budget-busting tax cuts for their wealthy donors.

Obama wants to extend tax cuts everyone except those who make more than a quarter million bucks, which is compromise with the Republican position. Romney's and Ryan's no-compromises plan calls for cutting taxes by 20% for the richest and getting rid of some capital gains taxes, which will only make the deficit that much worse. Plus they want to drastically increase defense spending, which of course goes to giant defense companies whose lobbyists sit on Romney's campaign committee.

The fact is, the only sense in which a Romney administration would be "bipartisan" is that he would be able to count on some Democratic support on key issues. And that's only because Democrats are not madmen willing to bankrupt the entire country to get what they want.

With Romney in the White House, and the status quo of a Republican-controlled House and only a slight majority of Democrats in the Senate, House Republicans would never compromise on anything. Because all money bills must originate in the House, House Republicans would continue to hold the country hostage to their special interest groups, cutting taxes for the wealthy, gutting the health care law, eliminating insurance coverage for birth control and access to abortion, destroying unions and dramatically expanding the income gap.

If Obama wins and House Republicans continue their sabotage and let the country fall off the fiscal cliff, it will become obvious to all who's working for compromise and who's in the pockets of the special interests. It'll be a rough two years, but maybe some Republican representatives will change their tune before the 2014 election.

The Republican Party has stopped being a political party and has become a mafia, complete with offshore tax havens and money laundering, secret operatives scaring up money from billionaires for their PACs, dirty trick squads throwing out Democrats' voter registrations and calling people in hurricane ravaged areas and telling them the election has been delayed until Wednesday.

Ryan's claim of "bipartisanship" is actually an implicit threat, like a mafia protection racket. If Obama is reelected Ryan and the House Republicans are threatening to continue their economic sabotage, using extortion, kidnapping and blackmail to hold the country hostage for Sheldon Adelson's tax cuts.

Now THAT is an endorsement!

God given right...no shit. That's EXACTLY why they hate the president as much as they do.

Ah, Now I Get It

At first I thought Mitt Romney's trip to Pennsylvania (billed as "expanding the map," according to his campaign) was a head fake to try to give off the perception of momentum. Now, I think that he knows that Ohio is unlikely and needs to make up those EVs another way. Obviously, Pennsylvania is a long shot for Romney but the last couple polls have been within the margin of error so perhaps he's hopeful that something can happen.

Remember, though, that a couple of polls don't tell the story. It's always the average of all of them.

Whither Erick Erickson

Erick Erickson is pretty much the polar opposite of myself but I couldn't agree more with him when he said, last year.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man. 

I've been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled.

Wow. And people are voting for this guy? Their emotions about the president are obviously so irrational that an unprincipled man is preferred.

Interestingly, he wrote this yesterday...

When I wake up on Wednesday morning, I'm still going to have my wife. I'm still going to have my kids. I'm still going to have my family. And I'm still going to have my God. So will you. I'm not going to think the end of the world is upon us if my side loses.

Does he know something the rest of us don't? If he doesn't, Karl Rove surely does, as Andy Tannenbaum notes.

In a Washington Post interview, Republican strategist Karl Rove had his Mene mene tekel upharsin moment when he blamed Romney's loss on the storm, even before the results are known, when he said: "If you hadn't had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy." He seems to have forgotten that Romney has been saying all those things for 2 years. Surely 3 more days didn't matter. What he meant was the storm gave Obama a Commander-in-Chief test and he passed.

Personally, I think people should ignore all this and continue to act as if it's razor thin. It would be bad if people think the president is going to win and then stay home.

Now about that poll and the independents...

Any poll that show the president ahead in any of the swing states has to be wrong because the Democrats aren't going to turn out like they did in 2008 and Mitt has all the momentum. All the independents are flocking to Romney.

Oh, and there are more Republicans than Democrats so the polls are skewed.

That's the conventional wisdom coming from the Right going into the last two days before the election. The good news is that if they are wrong, they'll just stomp their feet, make something up, and act like adolescents.  More good news: if they are right, every pollster is wrong, including NBC.

Let's take a look at that poll. First of all, it's not just NBC. The Wall Street Journal was also responsible for the poll and they aren't exactly a bastion of liberalism.The poll is of 971 likely voters more of whom identified as Democrats. This is why the poll is +9 identification in favor of the Democrats. What the Right fails to understand is that they aren't skewing the polls. This is how the people answered the question and, honestly, this is great example of how facts simply bounce off the bubble.

But Mark Murray, Senior Political Editor at NBC, decided to cut the Democratic sample in half just for shits and giggles. Guess what happened? Obama by three...which is the average of all the polls from Ohio and what I think will be right around the margin the president is going to win by on Tuesday. So, dudes on the Right, enough already.

Now as far as that independent claim goes...Newsmax-Zogby shows the president now up 2 points among independents, PPP shows the president up 49-44, ABC-WaPO and Politico show the two candidates tied. These numbers show a trend towards the president.

Overall, Rasmussen still has the race tied at 49-49. I consider that great news for the president.

Good Grief...

If the president wins, I shudder to think what some of these folks will do.

Whither the Polls

It's interesting to hear conservatives whine about how the polls are all biased and figuring Republican turnout to be too low and, conversely, Democratic turnout to be too high. The Democrats are not enthusiastic, they say, and won't turn out like they did in 2008. One has to wonder if they are trying to prey upon Democratic nerves and psych them out...nah, can't be.

Of course, the other way to look at this is more positive. By continuing to say (as many in the media are) that voter turnout is going to be lower on the Democratic side, doesn't that motivate more people to vote? Even out of nerves? I think it will.

Personally, I'd much rather be Barack Obama right now, leading by an average of 2.9 percentage points in Ohio right now, than Mitt Romney and his supporters whining about polling bias. I am, however, willing to admit that there is a 16 percent chance that I am wrong about Ohio:)

Either Way

Most of my regular readers know that I have been friends with the all too rare author on here, John Waxey. Many also know that Mr. Waxey is the owner of a manufacturing firm in Wisconsin that does between 20 and 30 million dollars a year in business. In a discussion regarding Tuesday's election, John said

"Well, either way I win so..."

When I questioned his perceived gusto for Mitt Romney, he chuckled.

"Obviously, I'd rather have the president win because that's better for everyone. But if Mitt happens to win, all of his policies will help rich people like me so my life is going to be better."

Yep.