As my friend David put it, “Republican Hispanic outreach is working in Florida!”

Pablo Pantoja, who was until recently the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, has an announcement.

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others… The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable.

Read on.

Massachusetts Democrats go to the voting booth tomorrow for the primary in the special election to replace John Kerry.

Want a quick comparison of Ed Markey vs Stephen Lynch? WBUR has this quick summary.

The headline says it all, really.

The Attorney General of Texas — and I think it goes without saying which party he belongs to — has identified a greater threat to Texas than even North Korea:

One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons…

And what is this threat?

The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration…

Remember: this is the Attorney General of Texas saying this.

Oops.

A paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that has been cited by Republican lawmakers to justify eliminating the budget deficit contains “serious errors,” according to a study by a group of University of Massachusetts academics.

The Reinhart-Rogoff paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” argued that countries with public debt in excess of 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered measurably slower economic growth.

The new study — by economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin — says that the Harvard economists excluded some data and unconventionally weighted the statistics they included to reach their conclusions.

This led to “serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth,” Herndon, Ash and Pollin said in the paper published yesterday.

Remember when the “Tea Party” was supposedly a non-partisan group concerned with lower taxes and smaller government?

Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips has announced that

It is a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist… The reason we will be hit again is because our government is not committed to destroying our enemy. Radical Islam is our enemy.

In a NYTimes editorial, Charles M. Blow writes:

The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change. Instead of turning away from obsolescence, it is charging headlong into it, becoming more strident and pushing away more voters whom it could otherwise win.

And too many of those hard-liners have a near-allergic reaction to the truth.

…People like Bachmann represent everything that is wrong with the Republican Party. She and her colleagues are hyperbolic, reactionary, ill-informed and ill-intentioned, and they have become synonymous with the Republican brand. We don’t need all politicians to be Mensa-worthy, but we do expect them to be cogent and competent.

The LA Times reports:

A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.

Of course, don’t expect the GOP to actually listen:

A just-concluded gathering of conservatives in Washington cheered speaker after speaker who urged the GOP to stick to its guns and, instead, largely blamed the 2012 defeat on Romney or the way he ran his campaign.

Not that the report actually has much to say:

The report notes the party’s problems with women voters, especially unmarried women. But its 10-point plan for appealing to women makes no mention of the GOP stance on any social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that have turned off many of the voters in question.

We’re back! Our long, post-election detox has ended, and we’re back to keeping you informed. And by that, I mean “passing along Daily Show clips”.

Let’s start with this one, where the headline really says it all:
House Republicans Meet at a Former Slave Plantation to Practice Talking to Black People

Paying a visit to his Chicago campaign office the day after the election, President Obama choked up at what his staff’s commitment means to him.

Polling firms all have a methodology for making the people they polled match up with how they think the country looks. For instance, if 70% of the people they reach are women, they know that voters are not 70% female, so they give a lower weighting to their results from women, and a higher weighting to their results from men.

That leads us to UnskewedPolls. The crew at UnskewedPolls took a look at all the major polling firms – you know, the ones that kept showing Obama in the lead – and concluded that they were all liberally biased. Those polls had the audacity to assume that there would be lots of Democrats voting and not enough Republicans! When everyone knows that Obama is terribly unpopular and that most Americans are conservative, right? Clearly there will be lots more Republican voters than that! So UnskewedPolls took the poll data and “unskewed” them, adjusting the weightings.

Their results? Romney with 311 electoral votes! Romney wins by 3.5% of the popular vote! Romney will win 9 of the 11 swing states! I will admit that one of the things I was looking forward to on November 7 was UnskewedPolls getting a serious comeuppance – and indeed, UnskewedPolls is now a laughingstock, while Nate Silver and his “liberal bias” make a victory lap.

Here’s the problem, though. On election night, says a senior Romney advisor, the Romney campaign was shocked, astonished, devastated. There’s a reason Romney hadn’t prepared a concession speech: because he was fully confident he was going to win. Why? Because the Romney camp used the same methodology as UnskewedPolls:

They believed the public/media polls were skewed – they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night…

State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren’t oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans – there just weren’t as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

Romney’s late-campaign push into Pennsylvania wasn’t a Hail Mary play, it turns out; it was a “stretch goal”, since Romney thought he had the battleground states locked up.

If there’s one thing I hope comes out of the 2012 election, it’s that the conservatives will recognize that the right-wing media bubble they’ve been fostering and living in told them what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Plugging your fingers in your ears and declaring that anyone who says something you don’t like is under a liberal bias leads to moments like Tuesday night, when the Fox News talking heads were genuinely shellshocked that Romney didn’t win — even though poll after poll showed that Romney was at best even with Obama, at worst four points behind.

“Somebody needs to stand up and say, ‘When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these…wackos… all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.’”
– Rush Limbaugh, July 5, 2005

Dear Rush,
See above,

Love,
Me

Audio NSFW. Thanks to Mike for the link!

Frustrated that Romney/Ryan say they’re going to cut taxes without hurting the middle class or making the deficit explode — yet refuse to release any details on what they’ll actually do?

Wait no longer! Check out romneytaxplan.com for all the nitty-gritty!

It seems that Paul Ryan’s charity work holds up to scrutiny about as well as his marathon times:

The head of a charity in northeastern Ohio where Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his family were photographed cleaning dishes over the weekend said Monday that Ryan was not authorized to be on the premises and “did nothing” while there…

“They showed up there and they did not have permission,” [the charity's president, Brian Antag] said. “They got one of the volunteers to open up the doors.” Antag added that Ryan and his family “did nothing” while on the premises.

“He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall,” he said.

Ryan was photographed cleaning “large metal pans that did not appear to be dirty” during a 15-minute visit, the Post previously reported.

I just watched this… and was inspired to make another donation. Hopefully you will be too.

Obama + withering sarcasm. Two of my favorite things!