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.

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.

Obama + withering sarcasm. Two of my favorite things!

The best part about this new ad from the Obama campaign is that it uses nothing but actual audio from Mitt himself.

Mitt Romney has a problem with people giving lots of money to politicians, and then having those people be able to get favorable treatment from those politicians.

…the person sitting across the table from them should not have received the largest campaign contribution from the [donors] themselves … [It's] an extraordinary conflict of interest and something that should be addressed.

The people Mitt Romney is talking about, of course, are teachers, who, with their billion-dollar incomes, have flooded the political super-PACs with millions upon millions of dollars, pushing for the rollback of regulations designed to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic education collapse of ’08.

Sheldon Adelson could not be reached for comment.

“Wouldn’t you be overconfident if your only competition was this?”

The guy who once casually tried to make a $10,000 bet with a rival now brings us this:

“Is $100,000 middle income?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less,” Romney responded.

His campaign later clarified that Romney was referencing household income, not individual income.

The Census Bureau reported this week that the median household income — the midpoint for the nation — is just over $50,000.

Right — if your household only makes five times the national average, you’re “middle class”. I mean, when you only make $250,000, you can’t even afford an elevator for your cars!

Mitt Romney, whose father was born abroad and whose grandfather was a member of an unusual religion, is really the last person who should be aligning himself with the birthers. Especially since, hey, I’ve never seen his long-form certificate, so I have to take him at his word that he wasn’t actually born in Mexico and isn’t a member of the FLDS.

Yet here you go:

The presumptive GOP nominee, joined for a rally outside Detroit Friday by running mate Paul Ryan, joked that he had been born in a nearby hospital and that ‘‘no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. ‘‘

As you know, Mitt paid 13.9% on his taxes in 2010. Under the tax plan espoused by VP candidate Paul Ryan, Mitt would have paid… somewhat less.

In 2010 — the only year we have seen a full return from him — Romney would have paid an effective tax rate of around 0.82 percent under the Ryan plan, rather than the 13.9 percent he actually did. How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney’s income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan wants to eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends…

Romney did earn $593,996 in author and speaking fees in 2010 that would still be taxed under the Ryan plan. Just not much. Ryan would cut the top marginal tax rate from 35 to 25 percent and get rid of the Alternative Minimum Tax — saving Romney another $292,389 or so on his 2010 tax bill. Now, Romney would still owe self-employment taxes on his author and speaking fees, but that only amounts to $29,151. Add it all up, and Romney would have paid $177,650 out of a taxable income of $21,661,344, for a cool effective rate of 0.82 percent.

How does Mitt Romney introduce his freshly-minted VP pick?

“Join me in welcoming the next President of the United States: Paul Ryan.”

PRICELESS.

Unhappy about something you did in your past? Wish it hadn’t happened? Good news! You can simply say that you undid it, “retroactively”! No problem!

This handy technique via the Romney campaign, who admit that yeah, sure, Romney was the official, legal Chairman, CEO and President of Bain Capital during that 1999-2002 period when they caused lots of layoffs, but that Mitt “retired retroactively to February of 1999″ when he decided in 2002 that he wished he hadn’t been the official, legal Chairman, CEO and President of Bain since 1999.

(Folks on Twitter are having a field day with this one.)

Whichever Obama staffer or ad exec came up with the idea of using this for the audio deserves a medal. It sets the tone perfectly.

Mitt Romney says he left Bain Capital in 1999. Problem is, Bain Capital says the opposite:

Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”

Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

The timing of Romney’s departure from Bain is a key point of contention because he has said his resignation in February 1999 meant he was not responsible for Bain Capital companies that went bankrupt or laid off workers after that date.

Romney, of course, says he wasn’t really in charge after 1999:

Romney did not finalize a severance agreement with Bain until 2002, a 10-year deal with undisclosed terms that was retroactive to 1999. It expired in 2009.

Bain Capital and the campaign for the presumptive GOP nominee have suggested the SEC filings that show Romney as the man in charge during those additional three years have little meaning, and are the result of legal technicalities.

Of course, if you actually read the paperwork…

The Globe found nine SEC filings submitted by four different business entities after February 1999 that describe Romney as Bain Capital’s boss; some show him with managerial control over five Bain Capital entities that were formed in January 2002, according to records in Delaware, where they were incorporated.

A Romney campaign official, who requested anonymity to discuss the SEC filings, acknowledged that they “do not square with common sense.”

“Does not square with common sense” should be Romney’s campaign slogan.

The Guardian writes:

The lying from the Romney campaign is so out-of-control that Steve Benen, a blogger and producer for the Rachel Maddow show compiles a weekly list of “Mitt’s Mendacity” that is chockfull of new untruths. Benen appears unlikely to run out of material any time soon, particularly since Romney persists in repeating the same lies over and over, even after they’ve been debunked.

This is perhaps the most interesting and disturbing element of Romney’s tireless obfuscation: that even when corrected, it has little impact on the presumptive GOP nominee’s behavior. This is happening at a time when fact-checking operations in major media outlets have increased significantly, yet that appears to have no effect on the Romney campaign.

Why does this keep happening?

Romney has figured out a loophole – one can lie over and over, and those lies quickly become part of the political narrative, practically immune to “fact-checking”. Ironically, the more Romney lies, the harder it then becomes to correct the record. Even if an enterprising reporter can knock down two or three falsehoods, there are still so many more that slip past.