This article is a great rundown of how, exactly, conservative media’s bubble managed to misinform their audience so completely:

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout — Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election ’08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other “mainstream media” sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver’s expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

Sure, Silver could’ve wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Again, for emphasis: the degree to which Fox & company feel free to simply LIE hurts them, and it’s hurting us as a nation. It needs to stop.

Make time for this, but if you can’t, here’s a transcript:

MADDOW: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately president of the United States, again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math.

And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing.

And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone`s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually.

And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.

Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole, because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides, both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country.

They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions.

And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff.

And the if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is snuck a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them.

And unless they are going to is secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we`re counting on you. Wake up.

There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everybody. Big night.

This is a distillation of something I’ve said for a long time — since Clinton, really. The GOP has abandoned reason and the enlightenment. They prefer doctrine to fact, since for them at the highest levels, the only thing that matters is what had worked at the polls. Facts have no special weight for them over lies if the lie works better in November, and several times now that’s worked, or at least seemed to. It’s this notion that gave us birthers, but also insane hostility to gays as a wedge issue, and Swift Boating, and a whole host of other mendacious angles promulgated by the right wing.

This has to change. Every bit of ingenuity wasted on lies to gain power is ingenuity we’re not using for the very real problems we as a nation face. We’ll all be a whole lot better off if we have two functional parties instead of a center-left party dealing in facts, and a right-wing party made up of insane fundies convinced the earth is 6,000 years old and that we’re being led to ruin by a Muslim Kenyan usurper.

“Mittenfreude.”

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.