If you’ve got the IRS operating in anything less than a neutral and nonpartisan way, then that is outrageous. It is contradictory to our traditions, and people have to be held accountable.President Obama • Commenting on an admission that the IRS targeted conservative groups, many associated with the tea party, during the 2012 election cycle, following an apology from an IRS official on Friday and this morning’s leak of the Inspector General’s report to ABC News. President Obama’s comments came during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who’s currently visiting Washington D.C. to discuss the war in Syria. source
But the negotiations collapsed in acrimony because Gingrich and Santorum could not agree on who would get to be president. ‘In the end,’ Gingrich says, ‘it was just too hard to negotiate.’
Bloomberg Businessweek has a story about how Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich nearly ran for president together on a quote-unquote “Unity” ticket.
…
Hope that second to pick yourself up from fainting helped.
We must compete in every state and every region, building relationships with communities we haven’t before…Simple ‘outreach’ a few months before an election will not suffice. In fact, let’s stop talking about ‘reaching out’—and start working on welcoming in.Planned remarks by Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus for the group’s upcoming winter meeting. Since November, we’ve heard a lot from the GOP about “re-calibrating” its message to appeal to demographics it lost in 2012 (Hispanics, women, young people, African-Americans, LGBT folk, and others). What we haven’t yet heard is how, if at all, those recalibrations will manifest themselves policy-wise. Will Priebus, or anyone else at this RNC meeting, be able to articulate what policies the GOP has to offer the people who voted to reelect President Obama last year and expand the Democratic majority the the Senate? Or will they insist that it’s just a matter of messaging? Speaking of messaging, Priebus probably isn’t too happy about Republican darling Allen West’s latest. source
We are glad that so many voters made their voices heard in this election, but as we go forward we must see improvements in our election process. I have asked Secretary of State Ken Detzner to review this general election and report on ways we can improve the process after all the races are certified.Florida Gov. Rick Scott • In a statement regarding the state’s massive lines on election day. Scott plans to have his secretary of state investigate what happened — and to make improvements in the process. “We need to make improvements for Florida voters and it is important to look at processes on the state and the county level,” Scott continued. “We will carefully review suggestions for bettering the voting process in our state.”
It’s been a long long slog these past five years of backing the skinny guy with the funny name. But this election, to my mind, is immensely more important than the breakthrough of 2008, after the catastrophe of Bush-Cheney. What it has done is rip open the complete epistemic closure on the Republican right about what America now is. It has revealed that Fox News, Drudge, and the rest have been engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to create an alternative reality and get the rest of us to go along.
But this president has never been a radical; he has always been a moderate; he has been immensely skilled at foreign policy, ended one war and won another, killed Osama bin Laden and saved the American auto industry, deflected a Second Great Depression and initated universal access to healthcare. He has presided over a civil rights revolution and the beginning of the end of prohibition of marijuana. He has created the new and durable coalition that was once Karl Rove’s dream.
Americans saw this. They were not fooled. And they made the right call, as they usually do. What was defeated tonight was not just Romney, a hollow cynic, but a whole mountain of mendacity and delusion. That sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance ringing in the ears of ideologues and cynics. Any true conservative longs for that sound, the sound of reality arriving to pierce through fantasy and fanaticism.
We are the ones we have been waiting for. And now we have entrenched it deeply in the history of America and the world. That matters. May the next four years make it matter even more.
That said, the reaction by Ace of Spades HQ was pretty rich.
Infographic: How long Tumblr users waited at the polls
The amount of time 137 ShortFormBlog and Tumblr Election readers spent waiting at the polls to vote today. (We asked earlier tonight.) One unlucky person waited three and a half hours. :(
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
We’ve put out materials specifically aimed at individual voters so that they have the basic information that they need. Everything from one-page guides for [organizations] getting their members involved, or just urging their members to go [vote], so they know what the law is.Fair Elections Legal Network president and cofounder Robert Brandon • Discussing the work they put in to make sure your post counts. They’re not alone. A number of other organizations put in significant amounts of time to ensure that voters were informed and aware of their rights as they went to the polls. “If somebody’s going door to door, trying to convince people to go vote, they can hand them these palm cards and it’ll say, in the case of Pennsylvania, ‘You do not need a photo ID to vote in this election,’” Brandon emphasized.
I voted day-of, so it was slightly more complicated, but I was in and out within half an hour. I got there around 5:30 p.m. EST. — Ernie @ SFB
Obama vs. Romney: An analysis of the infamous e-mail campaigns
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been swamped in campaign e-mails over the last few weeks. (We even spotted some good unintentional fanfic from the Obama subject lines.) The campaigns are doing some incredibly interesting things with the format, but man, do they get overwhelming sometimes. E-mail marketing company Klaviyo was equally interested, and they found a couple of interesting things:
- one There was a nearly two-month gap where Romney’s camp didn’t send e-mails. Obama sent e-mails nearly the entire time between June and November. Both campaigns ramped up in the last few weeks.
- two One in seven Obama e-mails used one-word subject lines, something which Romney never did. Obama also relied heavily on subject lines which ended with colons (i.e. “This Matters:”) — something which weirded out Klaviyo’s Ed Hallen.
- three Romney’s camp was more likely to send e-mails from with name lines of people other than the presidential candidate, his VP candidate, or his spouse. Nearly half of all Obama camp e-mails, on the other hand, came from “Barack Obama” himself. But we all know Obama was too busy running the country to actually send all of those himself.
From a marketing perspective, these campaigns will be watched closely because they’re doing fairly innovative things with the format. On the other hand, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m gonna be glad not to get so many e-mails.
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
Barack Obama campaign e-mails, I will miss you.
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Does your brain feel like it’s melting? Blame the campaign ads.
It’s the final week before the election, and rich people are shoving money into Senate campaigns left and right, The Washington Post reports. If you’re in one of the battleground states, we feel for you. All these annoying ads are probably testing your patience when all you want to do is watch “King of the Hill” reruns while eating Hot Pockets and otherwise being vegetative. And if you live in Montana, we doubly feel for you:
Perhaps no state has been so consumed by outside spending as Montana, where advertising is very cheap compared to large states with urban populations such as Ohio and Florida. There, according to the GOP tracking document, [Jon] Tester ($311,000) and [Denny] Rehberg ($515,000) will blanket the state’s seven small media markets with their closing ads in their competitive race.
Are you at the point where you just don’t care anymore? Think you’ll queue up Netflix and watch a “King of the Hill” marathon on election day rather than, y’know, voting? Just a thought of encouragement here: Don’t listen to the majority. Don’t feel like you’re at a crossroads. Read up on the issues, get a grip on foreign, domestic and economic policy issues, and vote for yourself. And don’t merely base your opinion on the fact that Denny Rehberg wears flannel in his official Congressional photo and looks like a distant relative of Ron Swanson. You can do better than that.
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
Why campaign ads are getting increasingly annoying.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcqa8e14P01rdkipfo1_500.jpg)
Does your brain feel like it’s melting? Blame the campaign ads.
It’s the final week before the election, and rich people are shoving money into Senate campaigns left and right, The Washington Post reports. If you’re in one of the battleground states, we feel for you. All these annoying ads are probably testing your patience when all you want to do is watch “King of the Hill” reruns while eating Hot Pockets and otherwise being vegetative. And if you live in Montana, we doubly feel for you:
Perhaps no state has been so consumed by outside spending as Montana, where advertising is very cheap compared to large states with urban populations such as Ohio and Florida. There, according to the GOP tracking document, [Jon] Tester ($311,000) and [Denny] Rehberg ($515,000) will blanket the state’s seven small media markets with their closing ads in their competitive race.
Are you at the point where you just don’t care anymore? Think you’ll queue up Netflix and watch a “King of the Hill” marathon on election day rather than, y’know, voting? Just a thought of encouragement here: Don’t listen to the majority. Don’t feel like you’re at a crossroads. Read up on the issues, get a grip on foreign, domestic and economic policy issues, and vote for yourself. And don’t merely base your opinion on the fact that Denny Rehberg wears flannel in his official Congressional photo and looks like a distant relative of Ron Swanson. You can do better than that.
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
Why campaign ads are getting increasingly annoying.
The tough FEMA question to ask before the election: Who pays?
Back in 2011, during a debate moderated by CNN’s John King weeks after the Joplin, Missouri tornado, Mitt Romney said this about disaster relief funding: “Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.” (His office released a statement backing off this stance, saying he would give the funding to the states.)
His running mate, Paul Ryan, had this line in his budget plan: “The disaster declaration is intended as a process to help state and local governments receive federal assistance when the severity and magnitude of the disaster exceeds state and local resources, and when federal assistance is absolutely necessary. When disaster-relief decisions are not made judiciously, limited resources are diverted away from communities that are truly in need.”
And here’s what we’re currently facing: A fiscal cliff that’s going to force someone’s hand, because FEMA’s set to get a $878 million haircut if we don’t find a way to get away from that cliff, according to Wonkblog. And that’s on top of limits placed on funding by the debt-ceiling deal. The need for disaster relief isn’t going down; in fact, there has been more usage of federal relief than ever under the Obama administration, according to the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, which says it’s been on the rise since the Clinton years. (Though, as any fool with a TV set and an internet connection could tell you, 2011 was a rough year for devastating storms.)
Here’s the problem we face as a country — nobody wants to see people in trouble who aren’t getting help. And the best-laid plans and most careful consideration ultimately fly out the window when the problem is IMBY (which, being a DC resident, it kinda is right now). With a hurricane within shouting distance of the country’s most-populated corridor, Romney and Ryan’s tough talk won’t sound so tough on this topic right now, especially so close to the election. But we don’t have a lot of time to consider what we have in front of us. So, the question we gotta ask is: When it comes down to it, who will best fund disaster response in a way that’s effective and efficient, which won’t fall down on the job?
— Ernie @ ShortFormBlog
What do you guys think?
Today in political cartoons with an extra dash of clever: xkcd’s take on electoral precedent.
And now, your turn. What do you think? And wasn’t Bob Schieffer such a bro?
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