WhitePeopleMourningRomney.

After every big election, someone pronounced the losing party dead and buried. It would be a mistake to make that claim now about the Republicans, but they do have a very real problem:

The demographic changes in the American electorate have come with striking speed and have left many Republicans, who have not won as many electoral votes as Mr. Obama did on Tuesday in 24 years, concerned about their future. The Republicans’ Southern strategy, of appealing mostly to white voters, appears to have run into a demographic wall.

More here. It turns out that running on wedge issues designed to inflame older or rural white voters (gay marriage, immigration) tends to drive off younger voters, immigrants, and urban professionals. Who knew?

This isn’t something they can fix with better messaging. The GOP will need to seriously retool if they want to make a play for these groups and break up the coalition that’s elected Obama twice now. You can’t run on anti-immigrant xenophobia and expect the latino vote to break your way, you know.

Josh Marshall reminds us that the GOP has won the popular vote just ONCE in the last six presidential elections (Bush v. Kerry in 2004). Before that, you have to go back to Bush the elder vs. Dukakis.

“Liberal Schadenfreude Hits Impossible Heights.”

Awesome.

Rachel Maddow answers, exhaustively. Make time.

h/t: Frank.

If you, like us here at Heathen, enjoy fact-based and rigorous analysis instead of pompous blowhards, you may enjoy this excellent editorial.

White students held an angry protest there last night over Obama’s re-election:

Students were heard shouting racial epithets about Obama and African Americans in general. One Ole Miss student, a freshman, said some 200 male students were gathered in the parking lot at Stockard and Martin freshman dorms at about midnight yelling racial slurs related to Obama and African Americans. The student said the 200 or so gathered fled when the police arrived around midnight.

There was also a reported gathering of students shouting racial slurs about Obama and African Americans in general near Kincannon Dormitory.

From John Scalzi’s endorsement of Barack Obama:

Look: The modern national Republican party is a hot mess, a simmering pot of angry reactionaries driven by selfishness and willful ignorance, whose guiding star is not governance but power, and whose policies and practices are tuned to build an oligarchy, not nurture a democracy. Its economic policies are charitably described as nonsense and its social policies are vicious; for a party which parades its association with Jesus around like a fetish, it is notably lacking in the simple compassion of the Christ. There is so little I find good or useful in the current national GOP, intellectually, philosophically or politically, that I genuinely look on it with despair and wonder when or if the grown-ups are ever going to come back to it. Before anyone leaps up to say that the modern Democratic Party has problems of its own, know that I do not disagree. But if your practical choices for governance of the country are between the marginally competent and the actively malicious, you go with the marginally competent.

In his campaign for president, Romney has embraced many of the worst elements of the modern national GOP policy thinking, up to and including choosing Paul Ryan, architect of a ruinously idiotic budget plan, as his vice-president. Romney’s run on this nonsense, and despite a late burst of tacking to the center, I think he’s beholden to it, and will be as president. I think it’s obvious that I believe it’s the wrong course for the country, economically, socially and politically.

More to the point, I think the real problem is that the actively malicious, awful and small-minded politics of the modern GOP have to be stopped. The modern GOP, simply put, has no moral center; it pays superficial obeisance to “traditional values” while yearning to implement policies whose highest moral achievement is consolidating wealth for the very few, and is perfectly happy to be as cynical as it needs to be to achieve that goal. If the GOP wins this election, it will simply become further untethered from the common good of the nation, because why shouldn’t it? There is no political reason for it to be otherwise. If mendacity continues to be rewarded, then mendacity is a legitimate strategy of power.

Is Nate Silver a witch?

Seriously? I mean, really? Taking Nate Silver to task for offering a “put up or shut up” bet to Joe Scarborough?

If there was any doubt as to how off-base you were, you removed it with your final graf:

When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. But he lost something, too: the right to act like a free agent with responsibilities to nobody’s standards but his own.

You’re correct that the relationship is unbalanced, but not in the way you think: Silver had plenty of exposure during the last election cycle as an independent voice. The Times gains more credibility for partnering with him than he gains exposure — you’d be covering him anyway. I’m sure the Times is paying him handsomely, but I’m similarly sure he’d be right to completely dismiss your tut-tutting here.

Fortunately, it looks like most people are taking Sullivan about as seriously as she deserves, even if Silver himself was gentlemanly about her bizarre wrongheadedness.

(Final link: h/t Frazer!)

It is not hypothetical to say that a Romney administration would be hostile to things like FEMA.

They are perfectly willing to say those things out loud, even with a storm of historic strength and size approaching the east coast.

h/t to Frazer, but I actually thought I’d already shared this:

Current has the answer.

Only Stephen Colbert is treating Trump’s bullshit offer with the respect it so richly deserves.

Bad Lip Reading on the first debate. Eye of the sparrow, baby.

Apparently, during his debate with Biden, Ryan whined that our Navy is now smaller than at any point since before World War I.

I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but let’s assume it is. (Given the aforementioned tactics of the GOP, this is clearly not a safe assumption, but go with it.)

What do we need a Navy for today? What is its job? Naval battles as decisive military engagements are basically a thing of the past. Countries don’t maintain ships of the line anymore. At this point no Navy in the world has an active battleship. Ever since Midway, the name of the game has been force projection and air power, and that means carriers.

During the Cold War, we sort of pretended we needed a big Navy, but really it was already the carriers (and submarines) that mattered the most. And that’s still true. And here’s the other part: You don’t need very many of either to have a decisive advantage over pretty much everybody else, and I’d say we have that pretty well in hand.

Of the ten nations that have carriers, seven of them have only one (and China’s isn’t usable). We, on the other hand, have twenty, eleven of which are giant-ass supercarriers, with more (of the Ford class) coming.

One thing you discover if you start reading about American naval power and carriers is that sources disagree on what counts as a carrier. The GlobalSecurity graphic I linked above counts basically all flattop vessels to arrive at 21, but most other sources just count the 11 supercarriers. Even if we go with that figure, though, the comparisons to the rest of the world are just as amazing: nobody else has more than 2. Our navy, all by itself, far exceeds the naval power of the rest of the nations of the world put together.

I’m probably pretty on board with us having dramatic, overwhelming, shock-and-awe level force advantages over any possible antagonist, but it seems kinda unlikely that we really need to maintain this kind of margin. We could drop by 30% and still have that, for example.

By now you’ve seen the clever DNC site RomneyTaxPlan.com (if you haven’t, check it out). It’s a pithy bit of campaigning, and it’s completely fair to tweak the candidate for failing to provide any specifics for his very pie-in-the-sky plan. There’s a reason he won’t provide any numbers, and that’s because they don’t add up. At all.

What’s more fun, though, is to have someone actually try to run the numbers; they just don’t work. There’s no way his stated goals can be met without raising taxes on the middle class. What’s more, he must know this to the be case, and just figures nobody will call him on it, and that folks will give him a pass on this cornerstone of his campaign should he make it to the White House.

What’s amazing to me is the degree to which the GOP sticks to this fact-free script. Actually, “amazing” is the wrong word; it’s been clear since the mid 1990s that the modern GOP cares more about winning than governing, and will do or say anything they think they can get away with if it hurts their opponents, or helps them.

The press has been seriously complicit in this by refusing to call out blatant falsehoods when these nincompoops try to trot them out, preferring instead to present both sides of any given issue as equally legitimate, even on questions of settled science.

Fortunately, there’s at least a little evidence that some members of the press are pushing back, at least a little, which (if nothing else) forces the liars to double down explicitly, on the record, for later ridicule. Hey, it’s something.

In all seriousness, you should watch this interview of the actual Stephen Colbert — vs. the character — on Meet the Press.

“All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory … all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell..”

As Tomorrow notes, this man sits on a key congressional science advisory committee. He is also a medical doctor.

He has since tried to distance himself from the remarks, claiming they were “off the record,” which to me sounds like “I didn’t think anyone would hear about them.” If he wants to disavow them, let him do so clearly and unequivocally.

This guy gets better and better: Since he’s clearly of the raving-nutbird-looney wing of fundamentalism, it should of course surprise you not at all that he’s been married four times.

(That sigh? Me being relieved this chucklehead isn’t from Texas.)

Yeah, turns out he’s also an idiot and an asshole, as he’s sent his employees an email that threatens to shutter his firm and retire if Obama is re-elected.

A Maine Republican running for State Senate is attacking her opponent for playing World of Warcrat, and includes in the attacks in-game quotes taken out of context, forum posts, and weird accusations based on her in-game class and role.

Oh, Republicans. I keep thinking you’re done, and you keep finding even more impressive ways to be stupid.

Fortunately, the Democratic candidate responded very, very well:

I think it’s weird that I’m being targeted for playing online games. Apparently I’m in good company since there are 183 million other Americans who also enjoy online games. What’s next? Will I be ostracized for playing Angry Birds or Words with Friends? If so, guilty as charged!

What’s really weird is that the Republicans are going after my hobbies instead of talking about their record while they’ve been running Augusta for the last two years. Instead of talking about what they’re doing for Maine people, they’re making fun of me for playing video games. Did you know that more people over the age of 50 play video games than under the age of 18? As a gamer, I’m in good company with folks like Jodie Foster, Vin Diesel, Mike Myers, and Robin Williams. Maybe it’s the Republican Party that is out of touch.

Updated: 2nd link fixed.

Via Wheaton.

This country does in fact have a serious deficit problem. But the reality is that the deficit was caused by two wars – unpaid for. It was caused by huge tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country. It was caused by a recession as a result of the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street. And if those are the causes of the deficit, I will be damned if we’re going to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, the sick, the children, and the poor. That’s wrong.

Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator (I-VT), Senate Budget Committee, Nov. 18, 2011.

This is pretty flabbergasting. Seriously.

“What’s killing us is all these entitlements, we’ve got to get rid of all of them. All this welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and then big government health care on top of it, it’s all just too much! When do we say enough is enough?”

What do you mean, exactly, I ask him. You say people are suffering under Obama, don’t they need some help?

“No. No more help, enough is enough. People have to pick themselves up, take some responsibility. Why should we be paying for people’s mistakes and bad choices? All these illegitimate families just adding to the population, making all these bad decisions, then asking us to pay for it? It’s time to cut them off.”

I ask for some clarification: what do you mean, just starve them out? What if people can’t find work? Let them starve?

“Look, there’s always something you can do. You telling me people can’t make a choice for a better life? We have to help all of them? No. I’ll tell you what really need to do with these illegitimate families on welfare—give all the kids up for adoption and execute the parents.”

Jeffrey McManus: Things About the US Constitution That Conservatives Do Not Absolutely Adore.

As it happens, our President wrote a couple books.

One of them, a personal memoir called Dreams from my Father, includes a number of anecdotes from Obama’s youth.

There is an audiobook of this book. And the President does the reading. And so…:

The main draw of the audiobook is that it’s actually narrated by Obama. It’s interesting to hear him imitate the voices of some of the people that have been important in his life. Like Ray, for example.

Ray, a former high school classmate, was savvy and streetwise, with a new take on black culture and white America. Best of all, Ray had an extremely colorful manner of self-expression. In other words, he cursed. A lot.

That means the President curses. A lot.

In fact you’re about to hear the POTUS swear like a motherfucker.

Follow the links, and you, too, can download a few choice MP3s. Heh. Get your own damn fries.

WTFU2012.com.

No, not kidding.

The story (at Slate) is on the clickthru, but the money quote from my friend Will’s blog is this:

I’ve been black in Alabama my whole life so, you know, I knew it was racist, but it took a black man being elected president before I realized just =how racist= this entire country really is.

He’s not wrong.

An angry old fuck in Austin lynched a chair in his yard. Madcap hilarity, of course, ensued.

Step 1: Be sisters with a former West Wing actress.

Step 2: Engineer a charming West Wing reunion as a voting PSA.

At the so-called Values Voter summit — sponsored the Family Research Council, a noted hate group — Santorum stated openly that “we will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”

Kurt Eichenwald has, including the volumes of Presidential Daily Briefings now public, and it turns out the Bush White House knew way more than has been previously discussed, and chose to ignore those warnings out of a misguided and unsupported belief that the “real” threat was Iraq.

By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous, but the neoconservatives’ suspicions were nevertheless carrying the day.

Ah, neocons. Fuck each and every one of them, and then put ’em in jail. Jesus.

You can tell it’s all true, btw, because the right’s response has been to send out professional liar Ari Fleischer to smear Eichenwald as a “truther.” In this segment on AC360, the level of sheer smugtastic douchery from Fleischer is breathtaking.

Via Q.

I know you’ll be as surprised as I was to learn that, apparently, a Republican CAN lie too much for Fox News. This morning, Fox is running an editorial on Paul Ryan’s address that includes this:

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

The author goes on from there.

Only a truly ignorant, frothy, profoundly stupid movement could recast Agenda 21 — a nonbinding (obviously) 1992 UN resolution calling for cooperation to address hunger, poverty, sustainability, and related issues most people think of as worthwile — as some sort of sinister plot bent on robbing us of sovereignty, but, well, that’s where we are.

After a few more whereases, the committee gets down to the business of “exposing … the dangerous intent of the plan,” resolving to send a copy of this gem … to every Republican candidate and elected official in the country, and pushing for the resolution to be adopted into the official Republican Party Platform at the national convention in Tampa, Fla., in August.

But here’s the thing: Agenda 21 has been around for TWO DECADES, and, as the RNC resolution points out, “the U.S. government and no state or local government is legally bound by [it].” The agenda, which grew out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, is a call for international cooperation to address poverty, hunger, and a host of other issues tied to the unraveling of natural ecosystems. It calls for “the broadest public participation and the active involvement of the non-governmental organizations.”

Good Christ, likely Texas senator Ted Cruz (R-wingnutistan) has been citing it as an all-purpose boogeyman, and is freely telling complete lies about its contents. Granted, that’s a pretty safe sort of lie; nobody ever accused the frothy right wing of, you know, reading these sorts of documents. (You can, if you like, peruse it on the UN’s own site — I found it in about 2 minutes, though I’m one of those educated types.)

Via John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

So, here’s the sequence:

1. The Obama campaign runs an ad that, perhaps unfairly, accuses Romney of being responsible for the death of a woman who, after being laid off due to a Bain buyout, lost her health insurance.

2. A Romney functionary quite justifiably tries to deflect this by pointing out that, had the woman lived in Romney’s Massachusetts, she’d have had access to many more health care options thanks to Romneycare!

3. The conservative base has a giant freakout because, you know, improving health care options for Americans is EEEEVIL.

I don’t think you need anything else to declare the modern GOP completely worthless. I really thought this Onion story was satire, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look exactly like this situation.

The former chair of the Florida Republican Party, Jim Greer, stated at a deposition in May that they worked explicitly to suppress the black vote.

Seriously.

96 year old Latino former Arizona governor detained by border patrol in 100 degree heat because, you know, he’s brown.

You probably heard that there were new docs released regarding 9/11. Here’s Salon’s coverage thereof, but the real takeaway point is this, as articulated by Wil Wheaton:

The thing that I think a lot of people are missing when they read this story is that intelligence worked the way it was supposed to, but Bush the Incompetent didn’t pay attention, because he didn’t care. He was a lazy and stupid son of privilege who was too busy being on vacation to take his responsibilities as president seriously.

Consider this, though: all the laws passed in the aftermath of 9/11, including the PATRIOT Act, that we were told were absolutely necessary to save us from The Terrorists™ just aren’t. The system was working the way it was supposed to work, and the 9/11 plot should have been stopped, but we had an incompetent jackass president who didn’t take it seriously.

It is not:

Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.

There’s been lots of smart things written about the ACA ruling. Here are a few I found particularly on point:

• from Forbes, who are not known for their lefty politics: Don’t Buy the GOP Narrative That Obamacare Is A Tax On The Middle Class — It’s a Lie Designed to Mislead

• Wil Wheaton points us to a Daily Show bit wherein Romney is quoted as promising to a few changes (via repeal) to American health care policy — all of which are already part of the ACA. Romney is transparently scaremongering here, and it’s shameful.

• Also via Wheaton: What exactly is Obamacare, and what did it change? Seriously, read this.

• Finally, John Scalzi has some very smart thinking on the issue of Roberts’ vote in this case. He closes with “I don’t think there’s any question that Roberts is a conservative judge; a look at his track record and even at his ACA write-up makes this abundantly clear. I don’t think there’s any question that Roberts will continue to be a conservative judge. What the ACA ruling serves notice for, perhaps, is that Roberts is following his own conscience and reasoning regarding what it means to be conservative, rather than taking his cues from the the current right-wing orthodoxy. Ultimately, that’s what sending the right wing into their rage about Roberts: That now it’s possible he’s his own man, not theirs.” (By the way, the fact that Roberts has a chronic condition may well have played a role in his thinking here.)

Here’s what you’re supporting.

Glad you asked.

I’m sure enjoying the right-wing freakout on this stuff, but really the most bizarrely delightful aspect of this turn of events is that it means Romney must spend the summer campaigning on the promise of repealing a health care plan authored by the Heritage Foundation that he implemented at the state level in Massachusetts.

This is hilarious:

We told you last week about Louisiana’s new plan for educating its youth, which is to stop having a plan for educating its youth and just dump everybody into classrooms owned by private companies that replace teachers with Moses Explains Algebra on VHS.

They’re set to steer tens of millions of dollars into the new privatization program, which pays for vouchers that parents can use to send their children to religious schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal said the state was “changing the way we deliver education,” which is a lot like Domino’s saying it’s changing the way it delivers pizza by locking up the store and telling everyone to buy a Hot Pocket from the Vatican. In any case, Louisiana Republicans loved the plan. Until a group of folks showed up to ruin the whole thing: Muslims.

(From Slacktivist’s excellent post.)

Folks widely expect the Supreme Court to strike the mandate provisions of the so-called Obamacare bill despite widespread belief among nonpartisan Constitutional scholars that the mandate falls within the norms established by Wickard and referenced by this same court, and by Scalia specifically in the Court’s prior opinion that Federal law trumped state efforts to legalize the personal cultivation of marijuana for personal use.

The ugly and obvious fact is this: Scalia and his right-wing cronies rule based on politics, not the law. (N.B. that as apparent cover for his no-doubt predetermined vote on ACA, Scalia has published a book in which he disavows Wickard!) They work backwards from the desired outcome, not forwards from established precedent and legal principle. Moreover, they’re willing to blow established precedent when it suits them, as in Citizens United and, most likely, this ACA case w/r/t Wickard.

James Fallows has more over at the Atlantic. You should read it.

Bonus hilarity: Who wants to bet the same 5 conservative justices would uphold ACA if it had been a continuation of Romneycare under a Republican president?

Via Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr:

It somehow became an article of faith on the right that Obama is “the most extreme President in American history.” Although when they say that, I think what they really mean is, “He’s black.” — Bill Maher

Once Washington was a happy place where a girl and her mother could be groped simultaneously in good fun by a white supremacist. Sadly, it has all been ruined by Kim Kardashian and Ezra Klein.

It’s from this takedown of Sally Quinn in reference to her absurdly hilarious piece here, as quoted at Electrolite.