The Swamp.

This timeline shows how incestuous the Washington swamp actually is.

Seems like these two points make out the beginning of problems for the DNC.


//March: Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie, the law firm for the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. Perkins Coie general counsel revealed this week that Fusion offered to continue Trump opposition research it had started while working for a Republican candidate.

March 15: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio drops from the Republican primary after losing to Trump in his home state.

April: Perkins Coie, using money from the Clinton campaign and DNC, hires Fusion GPS. Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie partner and general counsel for both the campaign and DNC, would serve as the bagman.

That month, Federal Election Commission records show that the Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie a total of $150,000 for legal services. The DNC paid the firm around $107,000. It is unclear how much of that went to Fusion GPS. Both the campaign and DNC would pay Perkins Coie hundreds of thousands more dollars throughout the campaign.//

And:


//Sept. 18: Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he was unaware of who paid for the dossier. It would later be reported that Podesta was sitting next to the man who actually did pay for the document, his attorney, Marc Elias. Elias apparently did not speak up during the interview to take responsibility for the dossier. //

It would seem to take a lot of chutzpah to lie about something in such a blatant way, but it seems that this has been the modus operandi of the Clinton campaign.

Maggie Haberman is well-known as a pro-Clinton journalist/hack.

Someone colluded with Russia and tried to "hack" the election, but so far it is looking like it was the anti-Trumpers.

Mitt Romney was right.

Hey, Obama, the '80s are calling; it wants its Cold War back.

Putin names United States as threat.

Who's laughing now?

Press mocked Romney for Mali warnings.

The downside of a never-ending race-baiting campaign.

Obama's approval with working class whites drops to 27%.

Osama is dead and Detroit is alive...

...good times, good times...

White House Press Secretary says Obama already let Detroit go Bankrupt.

After 40 years of warning us about voter suppression, the Democrats are finally proven right.

Study finds that IRS swung election to Obama.

Romney was laughed at last year for arguing that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt and that Russia was a threat...

....who is laughing now?

Many observers found this fixation strange, and Democrats tried to turn it into a punchline. A New York Times editorial in March of last year said Romney’s assertions regarding Russia represented either “a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.” And in an October debate, Obama sarcastically mocked his opponent’s Russia rhetoric. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” the president quipped at the time.

That line still chafes Robert O’Brien, a Los Angeles lawyer and friend of Romney’s who served as a foreign policy adviser.

“Everyone thought, Oh my goodness that is so clever and Mitt’s caught in the Cold War and doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” O’Brien said. “Well guess what. With all of these foreign policy initiatives — Syria, Iran, [Edward] Snowden — who’s out there causing problems for America? It’s Putin and the Russians.”

Indeed, earlier this summer, Moscow defiantly refused to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to the United States, prompting Obama to cancel a meeting he had scheduled with Putin during the Group of 20 summit. Russia has blocked United Nations action against Syria. And on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers that Russia was one of the countries supplying Syria with chemical weapons.

Nice that they waited until after the election....

...during election Obama bragged that "we refused to let Detroit go bankrupt."

Well, the election pretty much was all about Big Bird and dogs on the top of vans.

This is looking more likely now than it did in October of 2012.

The Daily Caller asks "Did the IRS give Mitt Romney’s tax returns to Harry Reid?"

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Harry Reid claimed to have intimate knowledge of what was secretly inside Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s tax returns.

As President Obama’s campaign slammed Romney nearly every day for not releasing more tax returns, the Senate majority leader repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that, at one point in his life, Romney hadn’t paid taxes for almost a decade.

He even did so from the floor of the U.S. Senate.

“The word’s out that he hasn’t paid any taxes for 10 years,” the Nevada Democrat claimed on the floor in August. “Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

It made big news at the time, but Reid’s old accusations are popping back up now that it’s been revealed that the IRS has been targeting conservative groups and in some cases, reportedly leaking their tax information.

Knowing that, could someone at the IRS have leaked Romney’s tax information to Reid? At the time, Reid claimed he learned of Romney’s tax background from someone who had once been an investor in Romney’s firm, though he wouldn’t say who.

Since the new IRS scandal broke, Republicans have found the question of who Reid got his information from — and from where — intriguing.

“We all wondered how Harry Reid had Mitt Romney’s taxes,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told The Daily Caller. “The question is, will he call for a full investigation into the IRS?”

Gee....ya think?!?!?!?
Republican member of Commission on Presidential Debates admits taht picking Candy Crowley was a mistake.

Frank Fahrenkopf, the former head of the Republican National Committee who serves as the co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said Tuesday that the group had erred in naming CNN's Candy Crowley to moderate one of the contests.

“We made one mistake this time: Her name is Candy,” Fahrenkopf said, according to Nevada NBC anchor John Ralston. 

Huh?  20% of Black Youth Voted for Romney?

WTF?  According to this source:

The number of young black men who cast a vote for the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 tripled that of 2008. Hearing this statistic, one commenter quipped, “Is this one of those situations where three times nothing is still nothing?”

No. “Nearly 20 percent of black males under 30 voted for Romney, more than three times what McCain got.” That according to Ann Coulter, who gets her information from Pew Research.
How? Why? Is there a growing number of young black conservatives?
Those stand as worthy questions. Answering them properly would require follow-up polling. Any number of factors could have informed these votes, which deviate markedly from the wider black community. At large, blacks voted 93% for Barack Obama, making it all the more fascinating to ponder why young black men trended toward the Republican candidate.
While we must wait and see if more comprehensive polling provides answers, likely influences upon the black vote hang ripe for analysis. Generally, it makes sense that the proverbial honeymoon is over. President Obama’s second inauguration cannot be as historic as his first. The novelty of beholding the nation’s first black president has faded over time.
Of course, there must be more to our cited trend than that. If fading novelty were the only factor, we would see the trend across the entire black electorate, and not merely among young black males. What do they see that their elders don’t?
For one thing, blacks fared worse under the Obama administration than in previous years. The Wall Street Journal’s Jason L. Riley confirms:

When the president assumed office, unemployment was 12.7% for blacks and 7.1% for whites. Today it is 14.3% for blacks and 7% for whites, which means that the black-white employment gap has not merely persisted under Mr. Obama but widened.

American Thinker’s Chad Stafko adds:

[A report from the liberal Center for American Progress], released in April, shows more dismal economic conditions in the African-American community. It found that from 2009 through 2011, black minimum wage workers swelled 16.6%, while whites had only 5.2% more minimum wage workers. Not only, then, has there been a disproportionate increase in the number of African-Americans who are in the unemployment line, but there is also a greater number of blacks working for minimum wage. This surely wasn’t the change African-Americans were looking for in Obama.

These results shouldn’t surprise anyone. After all, the kind of “change” which the president and his ideological ilk continue to propose ignores the source of value, and thus the source of wealth and prosperity.
 

So, according to Pew according to Anne Coulter.

It may be true, but I'd like to see the underlying study.

A good theory has to explain all the relevant data.

Glen Reynolds writes:

IF REPUBLICANS ARE DROWNING IN A DEMOGRAPHIC TIDAL WAVE, WHAT EXPLAINS THIS CHART? State Government Control Since 1938.

Let me offer an alternative theory: The bigger role the national media play in a race, the worst Republicans do. So the GOP does well in state legislative races and governorships, and U.S. House races, because national media basically ignore those. Does worse in Senate races, where national media will sometimes take notice, worse still for Prez, where the national media pretty much control the game.
 

Questions, Victor Davis Hanson has questions...

...like WTF if going on?

Susan Rice, who flat out deceived five times in a single day on national TV, is supposedly seriously being considered as secretary of State when Ms. Clinton leaves — the latter now plans to be “busy” when hearings on Libya resume. (If a John Bolton cannot be confirmed as a U.N. ambassador, how could Rice avoid a filibuster?) How can anyone now read Broadwell’s book and assume the research and analysis are disinterested? How did a single Jill Kelley warrant hundreds of hours of chat time from our highest generals, engaged in a life and death struggle in the war against terror and Afghanistan? Who was not consulted, not advised, not ordered — in order to free up time for Kelley and Broadwell? How could Broadwell, without a journalistic or history pedigree of achievement, warrant such intimate briefings, so much so that she can pontificate on a CIA annex in Benghazi and purportedly have access to classified documents? If she can, who cannot? Why in God’s name does Angelina Jolie get photographed on the seventh-floor office of the CIA? Why even have security clearances when you can learn classified details about our military and intelligence on Facebook or You Tube? How can all this suddenly explode on the scene, just 72 hours after a national election, in a supposedly transparent country with a free, watch-dog media? Have we become a Russia, Venezuela, Cuba? Is there one honest person in Washington left?
 

We live in Crazy-land.

We do not live in the United States of America anymore.

The answer to why we didn't hear the usual lament that negative advertising causes voters to opt out of the system.

Because, acording to Michael Medved, that was the plan:

The advertising avalanche by the Democrats highlighted Romney’s wealth, offshore bank accounts, job-exporting background at Bain Capital, expensive Olympics horse, bad singing voice, mistreatment of his dog, unpublished tax returns, murder-by-cancer of a steelworker’s wife, and general heartlessness and cluelessness. The Obama team knew full well that such messages would never persuade committed partisans to switch support from the Republicans to the Democrats and could even alienate a few of their own backers, particularly women, with their overall nastiness. But if the ugly tone of the campaign kept right-leaning independents or even undecided voters away from the polls then it would be worth it, shrinking the field of potential recruits Romney needed to close the gap and win the election.
 

In short, the impact of such an unpleasant campaign almost always will prove more damaging to a challenger trying to attract new votes than to an incumbent who needs only to hold on to the bulk of his old base. In this election, the lower overall turnout clearly helped Obama. The president got a smaller share of the vote in 48 of 50 states, everywhere except Hawaii and Mississippi, but he retained enough support in the diminished electorate to hang on to the White House. Lacking any confidence that they could reinspire cynical, disillusioned citizens about the glories of hope and change or the president’s heroic first-term achievements, the Obama high command settled for producing a general distaste for both candidates and even for the political process itself.

I visited Ohio the week before the election for a Cleveland town-hall meeting to generate enthusiasm for the Romney-Ryan ticket. The universal complaint from people on the ground in that crucial and advertising-saturated swing state involved thoroughgoing disgust, even rage, at the way nasty attack ads had taken over all the networks and cable outlets. The negativity couldn’t discourage the conservative activists who came out by the thousands to participate in our event, but it’s easy to see how the nasty tone might lead others to turn off the tube altogether and to tune out a political season that had turned unspeakably petty and bitter.
 

This Democratic investment in negativity may have helped Obama win his bare majority of a radically shrunken electorate, but it also contributed powerfully to the sour national mood and to the widespread perception that the neither of two flawed candidates offered the nation an optimistic path forward. Worst of all, the apparent success of this strategy makes it increasingly likely that future campaigns will follow the Obama example and pursue victory by alarming and discouraging, rather than inspiring and motivating, the already gloomy populace of a preternaturally pessimistic nation.
 

 

That theory certainly explains why this year the usual media hand-waivers weren't concerned about the negative effect that negative ads would have on voter turn-out.

Obama refuses to answer questions ...

...after his post-election speech.

It's the first time that's happened since Richard Nixon.

The best press the old Soviet Union ever had accepts it, of course.

He's probably afraid that someone might ask him about his lies about Libya or the mass lay-offs since the election or his agenda or how his numbers don't add up or....

Obama's Vision of America - an oppressor for every one of his constituency to hate.

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

In textbook community-organizing fashion, Obama won the election by brilliantly cobbling together factions with shrill warnings of supposed enemies everywhere. Young women were threatened by sexist Neanderthal males. Minorities were oppressed by neo-Confederate tea partiers. Greens were in danger from greedy smokestack polluters. Gays were bullied by homophobic Evangelicals. Illegal aliens were demonized by xenophobic nativists. And the 47 percent were at the mercy of the grasping 1 percent. Almost any American could fall into the category of either an Obama-aligned victim or a Romney-aligned oppressor.

How, then, can a reelected President Obama put the fractured American Humpty Dumpty together again after it has been shattered by such a nasty campaign? Certainly, it will no longer work for the president merely to wax eloquent on the need for more civility. Instead, his congressional opponents will expect more hardball Chicago politics and will probably reply in kind.

Maybe the mystery of the Republicans who didn't show up isn't such a mystery.

Ace describes his experience with the might Republican turn-out effort.

America - Now with even more hope and change.

Companies plan lay-offs in light of Obama tax increases.

Prudence - the first virtue.

Catholic film critic Steven Greydanus writes:

But let’s not kid ourselves about the extent to which our cause has so far failed to capture the American conscience. Consider: If you are a male Republican politician, and you utter a single stupid or ill-crafted sentence involving the words “rape” and “pregnancy,” that one sentence will cost you your campaign and possibly your career, while potentially having a harmful ripple effect on others in your party. Whether that’s right, wrong or the media’s fault isn’t the point. That’s the reality.

But if you are a Democratic president and run an aggressively pro-abortion campaign—unapologetically and even crassly putting abortion, contraception and sex in general front and center as never before, from Sandra Fluke’s convention appearance to the MoveOn ads with Hollywood actresses—well, this may not help you with women voters the way you think it will, but it won’t cost you the race either. Nor will presiding over scrapping the platform piety that abortion should be “rare” in favor of the call for universal availability of abortion to all women “regardless of ability to pay.” You can do all this, and Americans will, minimally, not abandon you in numbers sufficient to make you unelectable.

Allow every mitigating factor you wish. Yes, Romney came to the race with dodgy pro-life credentials, made the minimum possible obiesence to the pro-life cause, and continued to send signals that he wasn’t one of us. Yes, the Obama campaign painted a ridiculous caricature of Romney as an opponent of women out to abolish contraception and who knows what else.

None of that obviates the crashingly obvious point that Obama ran an aggressively pro-abortion campaign, and it didn’t cost him the race. This means we haven’t yet succeeded in claiming the moral high ground that is rightfully ours. Americans generally may not like abortion nearly as much as Obama clearly believes they do, but they also don’t generally regard it as the unspeakable horror that it is. That’s the reality demonstrated in this election.

America...now with extra hope and change.

Las Vegas business lays off 22 employees because of the prospect of Obamacare.