Post-Election Roundup

Okay, it's not really a roundup, it's just a place to dump interesting post-election stuff I happen to run into. It is by no means comprehensive. I will probably add to it as I come across more.

By Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:

Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.

Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.

...

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

...

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.

By David Brooks in the New York Times:

During the 2012 campaign, Republicans kept circling back to the spot where government expansion threatens personal initiative: you didn’t build that; makers versus takers; the supposed dependency of the 47 percent. Again and again, Republicans argued that the vital essence of the country is threatened by overweening government.

These economic values played well in places with a lot of Protestant dissenters and their cultural heirs. They struck chords with people whose imaginations are inspired by the frontier experience.

But, each year, there are more Americans whose cultural roots lie elsewhere. Each year, there are more people from different cultures, with different attitudes toward authority, different attitudes about individualism, different ideas about what makes people enterprising.

More important, people in these groups are facing problems not captured by the fundamental Republican equation: more government = less vitality.

The Pew Research Center does excellent research on Asian-American and Hispanic values. Two findings jump out. First, people in these groups have an awesome commitment to work. By most measures, members of these groups value industriousness more than whites.

Second, they are also tremendously appreciative of government. In survey after survey, they embrace the idea that some government programs can incite hard work, not undermine it; enhance opportunity, not crush it.

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.

The New Civil Rights Movement points tells of 22 states filing petitions to secede the U.S. Of course you know good ol' Texas is on the list. The Texas petition reads:

Peacefully grant the State of Texas to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government.

The US continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government's neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the US suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc. Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect it's citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.

As of Nov 12 at 1:54 pm, there are 23,401 signatures. If petition has 25,000 signatures within 30 days, a member of the executive branch must respond to it. Let me respond for them: "Good luck securing your border!"

blue milk links to a couple of articles worthy of contemplation.

Ken Rudin of Political Junkie has a good summary of the whole election.

Obama finished with 332 electoral votes — 62 more than the 270 needed to put him over the top. (Romney received 206.)

And what accounts for this result? According to leaders of the Tea Party and others on the right, the reason why the GOP suffered on Nov. 6 is because Romney was too moderate.

Hahahaha! Um, I think not. He goes on to illustrate all of the crappy teabaggers that lost in the Senate race, then points out (much like everyone else) the demographic shift that is underway:

Obama won women by 11 points. He took 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 93 percent of blacks. Sixty percent of voters under 30. Once upon a time, winning the white vote by a 61-39 percentage — as Romney did — would be enough for victory. Those days may be gone.

And of course there's the fact that Romney was just an incredibly weak candidate:

In the eyes of many, there never was the sense of who the authentic Mitt Romney really was. It was a problem for him when he squared off against his fellow Republicans and it was a problem in the fall. It wasn't that he was too moderate, or too conservative. It was a question of which was the real Romney.

Romney's defeat and the amazingly dramatic response to it by his supporters has prompted the formation of White People Mourning Romney, where you can see pictures of Republicans looking sad, horrified, and utterly defeated when the election results were in. Awesome.

And here you can see the 20 best Obama Memes, and celebrate that we have four more years to inspire even more awesomeness.

This guy Eric Garland wrote a "Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people." Hilarious while also sadly true.