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.