It's the day to get out and vote for Alex Sink, so we can scare the crap out of the GOP wingnuts controlling the US House.
Go fight win, Democrats. And to all my fellow moderate, ex-Republican Eisenhower/Roosevelt types, YOU GOTTA GET THE VOTE OUT TOO, JUST DON'T SIT THERE WITH YOUR NO-PARTY-AFFILIATE LABEL, VOTE DAMMIT.
I'll be updating this post as the day progresses, most likely after the polls close and the counting begins.
In the meantime, follow this link over to Vagabond Scholar where Batocchio has a list of CPAC responses. Just a reminder, that THIS is what you're voting AGAINST.
More specifically, that CPAC still uses Sarah Palin as a major speaker, and the tone-deaf efforts she makes to stir up the Far Right base... as the Unitarians say, "Activate Facepalm Mode". This is your modern Republican Party, folks... AVOID AVOID AVOID
GET THE VOTE OUT FOR SINK, PINELLAS COUNTY. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD... Find your precinct and VOTE DAMMIT.
Well, f-ck. This is pretty interesting because the GOP had been laying out an early narrative that Jolly had been mismanaging his campaign, but now they'll be crowing it as PROOF DEFINITIVE PROOF THAT AMERICANS HATE OBAMACARE AND OBAMA AND THE EVUL LIBRUL AGENDA.
The Dems ARE gonna be forced to go on the defensive about Obamacare now, and won't be able to stick to their narratives about hiking the minimum wage or protecting social aid programs like Food Stamps.
Dammit, Pinellas voters.
Here's your wake-up call, Democrats. GET THE GODDAMN VOTE OUT THIS YEAR.
This is my 498th post on this blog site (formerly Amendments We Need, now You Might Notice A Trend), so in 2 blog entries from now I'm gonna have an epic blog of total epicness that will be, um, epic. Please keep an eye on this blog. Until then you get this update:
...Sink's decision not to run was widely expected in Florida political circles, as she showed little sign of putting together a campaign and was up front about her ambivalence and her family's opposition. But until Friday, the former Bank of America leader and former state chief financial officer continued to keep the door open and several times pushed back her deadline for announcing a decision...
...Sink lost to Rick Scott by just over 1 percentage point in 2010, despite being outspent dramatically and facing a Republican tidal wave across the country. Still, many Democrats complained that Sink ran an anemic, excessively cautious campaign against a weak Republican who had run a company that paid the largest fine in U.S. history for Medicare fraud...
This basically leaves the way open for Charlie Crist, former (relatively sane) Republican turned (hopefully still sane) Democrat in the wake of the wingnut-ification of the GOP. While Crist has his critics even among his now Democratic allies (primarily that he's an opportunist), few can criticize his campaign skills. Crist left the governor's office under relatively popular terms: the only ones who hated him were the hard-line Republicans who felt betrayed when he fled the party in 2010 when the state organization turned far right.
Crist's polling numbers into this year are pretty solid against Rick "F-ck The State" Scott. If there had been a primary challenge between Crist, Sink, Nan Rich (so far the only other candidate in the race, but failing to raise interest or funds to keep up) and the others, Crist would have won but the primary process would have been brutal considering the left wing base of the Democrats won't trust him. A majority of Democrats seem to be backing Crist primarily because moderates and disgruntled former Republicans like Crist, and the primary objective - get rid of Scott - is something a majority of Floridians can get behind.
What can I say? I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...
Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post. The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.
Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts. Arithmetic, bitches.
Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears.
Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver. Arithmetic.
Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?
Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base. Like Pennsylvania. Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted). Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward. Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught. In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.
Winners: Obama's ground game crew. Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters. This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts. If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression. If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions. If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours. It worked.
Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party. As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother". Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are). Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority. Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.
Losers: Rick Scott. Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then. Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus). Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott. In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election. If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...
Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates. Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law. Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.
Winners: Women. Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level. Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress. Guess what, pundits? There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.
Losers: Senate Republicans. Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren). The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.
Winner: Me. The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots. Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan. Wow. Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks... wait, don't go! Sniff, it gets so lonely here...
Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later. Hi, Mitt.
Winner: Barack Obama.
And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:
Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"
Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer. What you all get for your value, dawgs? NOTHING! ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!
Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs. There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves... I'm serious. Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...
Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night. The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that. This is democracy in action. While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so. And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.
I didn't come up with a "What To Expect" for the Democrats' convention in Charlotte, mostly because I really did not know which approach they would take: offense (going after Romney/Ryan for being one-percenters obsessed with harsh tax cuts and even harsher spending cuts) or defense (trying to explain all the things Obama did do during his 3 1/2 years of being in the White House).
The possibility they would do both was there, but unlikely in my mind. And it turns out I was well off-target. For the most part it has been a healthy (or unhealthy depending on your POV) mix of speakers hitting at Romney's weak job-creation record and weak record supporting minorities and women, alongside speakers highlighting the accomplishments of Obama's administration on the steady economic rebuilding efforts.
There's still a little time left here before Obama should be performing his acceptance speech at the convention, though, so I could take a moment here to take a few wild guesses to what Obama will say:
An obvious thank-you to Bill Clinton;
An obvious I-love-you to Michelle and the kids;
A long and focused description of a jobs-stimulus program Obama hopes to get done if re-elected;
A short quip-worthy attempt to mock Republican inability offer any substantive proposals outside of "trust us";
An avoidance of Eastwooding: dude, it should be about class, and digging in that direction wouldn't be worth it;
A tribute to the soldiers (a theme in the DNC convention, something that the Republicans for all their flag-waving patriotism refused to do);
A call to action! Thrilling exhortation! ...oh wait, I'm channeling a pretty funny Doonesbury parody of your standard graduation valedictions... my bad.
So, anybody ready for a DNC bounce of more than 5 points?
