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Yay, Montana

From Crooks & Liars:

Initiative number 166 stated that “corporations are not entitled to constitutional rights because they are not human beings,” and thus is a blow to the Citizen’s United ruling that helped make this presidential election the most expensive one ever.

Today's Pix

Look Closely

From mistermix at Balloon Juice:

I’ve always thought that there was something fishy about the GOP’s GOTV and advertising operations. We’d hear every cycle that a massive, highly effective GOTV operation was cranking up to make the big difference in the election, but I never saw clear evidence of what, exactly, that operation was.

This is a great look at the basic swindle that's going on in the GOP.  It turns out to be practically nothing more than a microcosm of what that "party" has been trying to do to the whole world.  The approach is the same old trickle down crap - "if you pay the Operatives lots of money, they'll turn around and pay their staffers well, and then the staffers will have enough to go out and make the magic happen".  Everybody down the chain thinks he's a mover and a shaker, so he takes a nice big cut, and delegates the task down the line to the next guy.  So, by the time it gets to where something's supposed to get done, there's not much money left to make it happen.

Case in point (Breitbart, via Balloon Juice):

Project Orca was supposed to enable poll watchers to record voter names on their smartphones, by listening for names as voters checked in. This would give the campaign real-time turnout data, so they could redirect GOTV resources throughout the day where it was most needed. They recruited 37,000 swing state volunteers for this.

--snip--

Then at 6PM they admitted they had issued the wrong PINs to every volunteer in Colorado, and reissued new PINs (which also didn't work). Meanwhile, counties where we had hundreds of volunteers, such as Denver Colorado, showed zero volunteers in the system all day, but we weren't allowed to add them. In one area, the head of the Republican Party plus 10 volunteers were all locked out. The system went down for a half hour during peak voting, but for hundreds or more, it never worked all day. Many of the poll watchers I spoke with were very discouraged. Many members of our phone bank got up and left.
I do not know if the system was totally broken, or if I just saw the worst of it. But I wonder, because they told us all day that most volunteers were submitting just fine, yet admitted at the end that all of Colorado had the wrong PIN's. They also said the system projected every swing state as pink or red.

To me, this looks like the Operatives are all doing everything they could possibly do to put as much of that money as possible into their own pockets, while spinning the yarn back up to the Campaign Managers that everything was peachy dandy.

mistermix:

One of my core prejudices is that big consulting firms can’t write software. They’re a bunch of fast-talking MBAs who bullshit management into buying their services, and after they get the contract, all they care about is how cheap they can offshore a project, and how many hours they can bill. Well, Mitt Romney, the biggest consultant of them all, had to eat his own dogfood on Tuesday, and it was a goddam unappetizing meal.

I seem to recall stories of how totally fucked up everything was in the USSR all through the 80s - beyond the Kremlin, anywhere anybody looked, all they saw was empty factories and empty stores and empty streets.  But in Moscow, there was always a parade or a bunch of shiny things to look at, and lots of happy talk about the glories of the Soviet.

More recently, there's the story of how Sadam Hussein "totally fooled" the CIA into thinking he had WMD, or was "on the verge" of acquiring them.  But the real story was that after the Gulf War, Sadam's whole program collapsed, and it turned out that the people he was paying to develop the nukes for him thru the 90s were taking the money and submitting bogus reports of their "progress".  And the same thing happened with his Chem and Bio Weapons.  They just scammed the shit out of him.  And when we invaded, he had nothing.  Prob'ly came as quite a shock.

The power players in the GOP are mostly just like Romney.  They've spent their whole lives figuring out how to get somebody else to do the work while they count the money. And when suddenly they find that everybody under them has seen their example and learned to do exactly the same thing, they're surprised and they feel betrayed, but somehow they can't quite figure out what could possibly have gone so wrong.

Here's a thought:  The GOP always talks a good game about individuals and personal effort, but then they run political campaigns that are always top-down and tightly controlled.  Meanwhile they criticized the Dems for being all about Big Government and central planning when the truth is that Obama had a few people on the ground in thousands of locations who were given basic instructions and plenty of support, but who were also free to make it happen the way it needed to happen in their precincts.

And finally - which party just got its ass kicked for the second time in a row by a punk-ass community organizer and a bunch of wussie libruls?

Eat it, bitches.

The Popular Vote

Yesterday, I was thinking maybe the election wasn't the mandate politicians are always trying to claim they have.

Well, if this keeps up, I may hafta change my tune a little...

...cuz a difference of 3,000,000 votes does not indicate "a closely divided nation".

You can run all the opinion polls you want.  The only one that really matters is the one where people get up off their asses and cast votes to express their will.

I know I'm a hard-ass about this, but as far as I'm concerned, if you don't have the gumption to go out and vote when you have the chance, you can just shut up and step aside - the rest of us would like to get a little work done without listenin' to you flappin' your gums all day about how shitty you think everything is.

We Done Good

Bragging a little.

(Charlottesville & Albemarle County, VA)

I spent most of the day at my polling place.  And I overheard the Repub Captain on his cell phone saying he was scared because "the Obama people are here in force" (we had 3 or 4 at our table while the Repubs never had fewer than 5), and "they brought lawyers", and "can't you get somebody up here to help us?"  There was really just no way Obama was going to sneak up anybody, but the local Repubs seemed to think they'd walked into an ambush.

So I guess in light of what we've been learning about how Winger Media was misleading the GOP faithful, it must've come as quite a shock to these guys to see firsthand what the Obama ground game was accomplishing.  It was kinda weird.

Still Waiting

What the fuck, Florida!?!  Do you think you could get your head outa your ass just long enough to run a clean and efficient election once in a while?

As of today:

The GOP's always telling us that everything's so much better when they're in charge because they know all about making things work blah blah blah.

Let's see:
2000 - Repub Governor, fucked up election.
2004 - Repub Governor, semi-fucked up election.
2008 - Independent Governor - OK election.
2012 - Repub Governor - fucked up election.

And - just wondering - in a democracy (or a democratic republic or however you want to describe what we're trying to do here) can you think of anything that matters more than a fair election?  Anything at all?  Take your time.  Think about it for a minute or nine.  Then tell me what you think your Sec'y of State has to do that's more important than making sure the voting process isn't this recurring clusterfuck?  Get your shit together.

Avalanche On Bullshit Mountain

Dear Friends

To all those good folks who made all the phone calls and did all the canvassing and donated a bunch of the money and turned out to vote - all for the Repubs - and all for the privilege of seeing a great big bunch of your candidates get their butts kicked (after having been practically promised that they were all going to win by big margins) - I have to wonder: How much longer do we have to point out that you're being misled and lied to before you get the message?

Charles Krauthammer was wrong
Karl Rove was wrong
Rush Limbaugh was wrong
Larry Kudlow was wrong
George Will was wrong
Dick Morris was wrong
Mike Huckabee was wrong
Ann Coulter was wrong
Tony Perkins was wrong
Newt Gingrich was wrong
Sean Hannity was wrong
and on and on and on

All of them told you Romney would win - not 'could', but 'would'.  Some were a little less enthusiastic than others - they all strayed a little, and Coulter actually ran away for a few days, but every one of them came home and said it eventually; some as late as Nov 5 (even in light of very solid polling to the contrary), and some of them told you Romney would crush Obama in a landslide reminiscent of Reagan vs Carter in 1980.

If you guys are depressed and sullen and feeling lousy in general about losing so big, ya gotta start looking at how you keep letting yourselves in for this kinda shit.

Smart

Many many times, Rachel Maddow is just really annoying.  Just as many times, she shows herself to be among the smartest political analysts anywhere; and why it's a good idea for me to listen to people who frequently annoy me.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yeah - About That Squeaker

Obama's re-election wasn't the close call we kept hearing about during the last 3 or 4 weeks of the campaign.

And the spin being peddled by the GOP and RIght Radicals and Corp Media yesterday - about Romney winning the popular vote?  Bullshit, as usual, which raises the same old question about why these numbskulls have such difficulty getting a firm grasp on real things.  How is it they never learn not to spout off before they know what's goin' on?  It wasn't close, and once Florida gets its shit together, we'll see how 'not-close' it really was.

Seems like you'd have to get pretty tired of being wrong all the time.

I don't think I can call it a strong mandate in the traditional way the word 'mandate' is used, but when I consider the circumstances - low-growth economy, high unemployment, stagnating wages, ginormous deficit and debt; plus all the hyper-partisan obstruction in Congress and the true ugliness of the personal attacks, etc etc - re-electing Obama seems nothing short of miraculous.

So maybe it's just relative to the alternative,  but keeping Obama on the job seems like a very clear message.

We'll see if he can keep his staff and his cabinet together; and somebody has to be on the ball to avert the 2nd-term scandal that pops up with annoying regularity.  But here's hopin'.

Now What?

Take a short while and enjoy the feeling of winning something important.  But then we have to get on the phones and online, and start telling our Congress Critters to do everything necessary to get some shit done.  Especially the Repubs and Blue Dogs.  Steady pressure works.  Just make it a habit to call or drop an email on 'em about specific issues.  It's not necessary to obsess and do nothing but watch the news.  Just get an idea about what you want your representatives to do, and then tell them what you want from them - and do it regularly.

Like any other employee, they need to know what's expected of them; and once in a while they need to hear a strong message of "get it done or get out".

Irregularities

For every complaint from the Repubs about Black Panthers and Voter Impersonation etc, there's at least one or two real stories about this:



It's a big deal.  Even when my guy wins, it's a big fuckin' deal.  The legitimacy of the guy who gets elected depends directly on the legitimacy of the voting process.  Process counts.  That's why the framers put it in writing - in about a hundred places and about a hundred different ways.  Because if we're careful about how we get to the conclusion, we're more likely to get to a result that's fair and right, and doesn't make for sore losers.

It's a big fuckin' deal and we have to fix it.

hat tip = Addicting Info

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Today's The Day

GOTV, baby.

If you were expecting a big glorious post about Election Day - sorry - everything that went before is done and gone; everything that happens over the next several hours depends on our individual actions.  Nothing is written; our destiny is in our own hands.

I'm set to spend most of my day at the Earlysville fire station.  Gitcher butts out and vote.

God willin' and the crick don't rise, we'll be listening to Willard's concession speech about 18 hours from now.

Later.