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    1. The Daily Wrap

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      Today on the Dish, Andrew enjoyed a little Fox News Schadenfreude before diving into the Right's massive reality issues. He also wondered if George Will and his deluded brethren will ever have the integrity to find new professions, and then marveled at Romney's poor showing in CA and NY. After Massie checked on the post-election denial at The Corner, Michael Grunwald doubted the GOP would learn their lesson - not that Maddow and Heilemann didn't try to set them straight. Besides, as Larison noted, the Republicans have Chris Christie to inexplicably blame for Obama's victory.

      Also, Ackerman, Sasha Issenberg, and Michael Scherer looked at the success of the Democrats' nerdiness, and Massie, Ruy Teixeira, and others dug into the GOP's big Hispanic problem. David Simon championed America's new racial and social hierarchy, while Drum poured cold water on this week's liberal glee. Then while Romney sang a ditty, Lauren Ashburn took Douglas Brinkley's temperature on Mitt's future (in short: good luck). On the rest of the ticket, Noam Scheiber let the air out of the Paul Ryan effect. Also, despite the overall accuracy of Nate Silver, #DrunkNateSilver and the other poll-aggregaters, Jason Zengerle worried that the current math-frenzy would make future elections even horse-racier. Jonathan Bernstein and Nate additionally pondered the Left's possible edge in the electoral college, which Florida finally made 332-206. Jennifer Victor broke down the spending splits of Teams Obama and Romney, while Karl "Crossroads" Rove and his ilk learned they'll have "holy hell to pay" to their disgruntled bankrollers.

      Weigel and Ana Marie Cox remained happily astonished at Tammy Baldwin's victory, while efforts to bring marriage equality to Minnesota pushed forward. We also learned that - surprise - campaigning as a rape-philosopher is not the secret to electoral success. Later we loved to hate how Eric Dondero has sworn off his liberal acquaintances (except maybe Elton), and we laughed as Robert Stacy McCain posed as a grand historian to suggest "manful endurance" to the Right.

      In suddenly-legal weed news, Jacob Sullum sketched the upcoming timeline for CO and WA, which Paul Campos hoped Obama would be laissez-faire about, and assuming that's the case Erik Voeten imagined American drug tourism. Remembering last week's storm, Eric Roston compared the clarion calls of Sandy and 9/11, while our Face Of The Day still doesn't have power in Brooklyn. A wistful Lauren Slater contemplated the unprovable love of pets - even a raccoon - and Quartz examined the economic implications of Brazilian dog-ownership. Radiolab explained the physics of coffee rings, Alexis Hauk visited the graves of dead writers and Josh Levin warned against the distractions of music-listening while biking.

      Short men could jump in our Mental Health Break and there was Jersey snow for Obama/Biden in our VFYW.

      - C.D.

    2. Reality Check

      Screen shot 2012-11-08 at 6.50.02 PM

      Kevin Drum provides one:

      Liberals, you should rein in the triumphalism. Obama won a narrow 51-49 percent victory and the composition of Congress changed only slightly. This was not a historic vindication of liberalism, and it doesn't mean that we can suddenly decide that demography will sweep us to victory for the next couple of decades. The plain truth is that although an increasing number of voters are turned off by what Republicans represent, that doesn't mean they've become lefty converts. A lot of them are still pretty nervous about a big part of our agenda, and we have a lot of work ahead to get them more solidly on our side.

      Also: No matter how much you hate to hear it, long-term deficit reduction and entitlement reform really are pretty important. Just because conservatives abuse the point doesn't mean there isn't something to it.

    4. Face Of The Day

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      Theresa Goddard, her apartment still without electricity, is overwhelmed while discussing her living conditions in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on November 8, 2012. She and many other residents of the Red Hook public housing projects also remain without heat and running water due to Superstorm Sandy. Meanwhile a nor'easter storm plunged temperatures to below freezing. By John Moore/Getty Images.

    5. #DrunkNateSilver

      The best new meme this week:

    6. Grading The Poll Aggregators

      Daniel Terdiman ranks the poll-collecting mathletes:

      Silver wasn't the only one to do exceptionally well in the prediction department. In fact, each of the five aggregators that CNET surveyed yesterday -- FiveThirtyEight, TPM PollTracker, HuffPost Pollster, the RealClearPolitics Average, and the Princeton Election Consortium -- successfully called the election for Obama, and save for TPM PollTracker and RealClearPolitics handing Florida to Romney, the aggregators were spot on across the board when it came to picking swing state victors. 

      But, overall, Silver still reigns supreme:

      Read On »

    7. Scapegoating Christie

      Larison looks on as Republicans attempt to pin Romney's loss on the New Jersey governor:

      It’s a reminder that it was never Christie that these activists liked. What these activists liked was the reliable partisanship that he seemed to practice. When he didn’t act the part of the angry partisan that they were used to seeing, and instead acted as a self-interested politician and responsible state official would, they no longer had any use for him. The fact that he had been considered an effective surrogate for Romney over the last several months is quickly forgotten, and all that remains is the idea that Christie "betrayed" the cause by doing something that any other official in his position would have done.

    8. Will The Right's Fever Break? Ctd

      Maddow's thoughts on the matter:

      John Heilemann sees no alternative for the GOP:

      Republicans now find themselves facing a moment similar to the one that Democrats met in the wake of the 1988 election, when the party found itself markedly out of step with the country — shackled to a retograde base, in the grip of an assortment of fads and factions, wedded to a pre-modern policy agenda. And so, like the Ds back then, the Rs today must undertake a wholesale modernization of their party, starting with, but not limited to, making real inroads with those ascendant elements of the electorate. Doing so will be a Herculean task, and one that will require not just institutional resolve but individual leadership; it will require, that is to say, that the Republicans find their own version of Bill Clinton circa 1990. But daunting as the task may be, what last night indicated is that the party has no choice but to undertake the assignment — because to forgo it would be to risk not just irrelevance but extinction.

    9. For The Record

      The Republican candidate failed to get even 40 percent of the vote in New York State and California. The latter is the most remarkable. It was Nixon's and Reagan's home-state. And now their party is essentially based in Mississippi.

    10. The Electoral College Leans Left?

      Noting that Obama's EC vote percentage was significantly higher than his popular vote percentage, Jonathan Bernstein wonders whether Democrats have a structural advantage in the Electoral College. Nate Silver finds reason to think so:

      Two more presidential elections, 2016 and 2020, will be contested under the current Electoral College configuration, which gave Barack Obama a second term on Tuesday. This year’s results suggest that this could put Republicans at a structural disadvantage. Based on a preliminary analysis of the returns, Mitt Romney may have had to win the national popular vote by three percentage points on Tuesday to be assured of winning the Electoral College. The last Republican to accomplish that was George H.W. Bush, in 1988.

    11. 332 - 206

      Now it's official with Florida going to Obama. Senate: 55 - 45 Democratic, an abysmal showing for the GOP in this cycle. House? 234 - 195 for the GOP.

    13. How Out Of It Was George Will?

      Just a reminder of one specific prediction before the election:

      I'm projecting Minnesota to go for Romney. Now, that's the only state in the union, because Mondale held it -- native son Mondale held it when Romney was -- when Reagan was getting 49 states -- the only state that's voted Democratic in nine consecutive elections. But this year, there's a marriage amendment on the ballot that will bring out the evangelicals and I think could make the difference.

      Obama won Minnesota by 53 - 45. The anti-marriage equality amendment? It failed to pass. And liberals triumphed in the legislature. I've long respected George Will, like Michael Barone. But they both simply haven't moved with the times. They're stuck in the American past and the conservative cocoon. And they have just made total fools out of themselves. Michael has written a heart-felt mea culpa on misreading the numbers and on live television was the man who talked Karl Rove out of his state of denial. George F Will's latest column takes no responsibility for his simply crazy prediction of a 321 - 217 landslide for Mitt Romney. Maybe he will do so - and explain why he had no idea that America had lots of brown and black and female and gay citizens until late Tuesday night.

      But a question: If someone is that out of touch with reality, why are they given jobs as analysts in television or the newspapers? If a dentist drilled into your forehead rather than your tooth, he'd be accountable. Those paid handsomely to examine the American social and political landscape can miss by the same mile and blithely carry on as if nothing had happened.

      At the very least, these conservative intellectuals need to explain their simply staggering ignorance of the country they live in, why they refused to believe the data, why they insisted that America was still where it was in 1980. If they really had integrity, an error of this magnitude, repeated with such emphasis, in the face of overwhelming evidence, up to the day before it was revealed as a total mirage, would prompt them to quit their current jobs and do something more useful.

      Will Will?

    14. Hathos Alert

      "All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt. I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats," - Eric Dondero, LibertarianRepublican.net.

      Dan Amira interviewed Dondero about the logistics of his boycott. Money quote:

      Elton John is a toughie. You know he leans left. But he made friends with Rush Limbaugh of all people last year. So, I give him a pass.

    16. America's Amsterdam?

      Erik Voeten wonders about drug tourism to Colorado and Washington state:

      It could be that these states (and especially the border areas) are sufficiently sparsely populated that the nuisance of drug tourism is going to be less visible and the political power of those affected less strong than in densely populated The Netherlands. Nevertheless, the Dutch experience suggests that there are some downsides to being a first mover on this front. Policy makers in other countries have pointed to increases in petty crime and localized opposition as an argument against further legalization; thus amplifying the problems for the Netherlands. It may be that the American West harmonizes more quickly but we should think about why this has not happened in Europe.

    17. Next Up: Minnesota?

      Feel the spontaneous joy from the members of Minnesotans United Campaign upon hearing that the anti-equality constitutional amendment failed:

      In addition to voting down the amendment, Minnesotans also gave DFL, the state's left-wing party, majorities in both the House and Senate. The interpretation from Joshua Newville:

      Since last night’s election also gave the DFL control of the Minnesota legislature, and since Governor Dayton is pro-marriage equality, it is almost certain that, despite initial words to the contrary, Minnesota is now on the fast-track to also establishing marriage equality.

      Doug Grow's reporting suggests otherwise:

      Spending the last two years in the minority has been a sobering experience for DFLers. But it’s also been educational. They’ve seen what happens when a majority party jams things like marriage and voting amendments onto the ballo[t] without bipartisan support. DFL Rep. Ryan Winkler said watching how Minnesotans approached this election "made me proud of our state. … Minnesotans don’t like it when you overstep. That’s what Republicans did, and it’s something we have to remember, too."

      Dale Carpenter, who worked on the state's equality campaign, reflects on how the amendment was defeated and its greater implications:

      Read On »

    18. If A Skinny Kid With A Funny Name Can Do It ...

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      Weigel marvels at Tammy Baldwin's historic win - as both the first openly gay Senator and the first female from Wisconsin:

      [It] may be the second-biggest story of the night. Six years ago, Wisconsin voted on one of those gay marriage bans that plagued the land in the post-Goodrich era. All but one county approved the ban. Today, they have the nation's first openly gay senator, who now has to figure out what she wants to do with that. I'm amazed at how she came in under the radar. ... Republicans underestimated her for a year, assuming that Tommy Thompson's crossover votes would save him. (I don't blame them!) He won his last election in 1998 by 22 points, and you look at a number like that and you figure you have some loyalty.

      Transcript of Baldwin's acceptance speech here. Ana Marie Cox looks to the horizon:

      It took less than 50 years for the US to go from the first black senator of the modern era to the first black president. How long it will take to get to the first gay president is perhaps less important than being able to imagine that there could be one…. Because of Tammy Baldwin, every morning, that many more children can look in the mirror and see one, too.

      (Photo: U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) celebrates her victory over Republican candidate Tommy Thompson on November 6, 2012 in Madison, Wisconsin. By Darren Hauck/Getty Images)

    19. Deflating The Paul Ryan Hype

      Noam Scheiber suspects that Ryan hurt the ticket:

      [J]ust in case anyone was tempted to forget some recent history and insist that unleashing Ryan would have pushed Romney over the top, there was one place Romney simply couldn’t keep him hidden: Southeastern Wisconsin. In 2008, before Ryan became the leader of the GOP’s war on government, and long before Romney thrust him and his bold ideas into the national spotlight, Ryan carried his Wisconsin congressional district by a 29-point margin. On Tuesday, he won it by a mere 13-points, even as Obama’s Wisconsin margins fell in half. If Republicans want to try replicating this special form of magic on a national scale, I’m sure President Biden will be the first to thank them.

    20. Love Unprovable

      Lauren Slater recounts her time spent in a foster home and the pet raccoon that helped her adjust:

      When Amelia came to us she was wild, but within 24 hours it seemed to me she’d consented to tameness. I had no way of knowing that this was untrue. I didn’t understand that when Amelia followed me everywhere she acted out of instinct, not fondness. Later I read the work of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who made famous Eddythe fact that orphaned wild ducklings would cathect to the first person they saw after struggling free from their shells, that person’s face indelibly imprinted on the infant animal’s malleable brain. I’d see in Lorenz’s book photos of him walking like the Pied Piper, a long line of geese waddling behind him. Lorenz also discovered that if, upon birth, the wild geese first saw a boot, or a spoon, in motion, they would imprint upon it with the same ferocious loyalty, longing only to be near the inanimate object, somehow sucking from it succor and safety without thought or plan.

      Amelia, in other words, was not following me because she loved me; she followed me because some dumb drive urged her to do so, the drive itself as wild as wings or water. Does this diminish the encounter? Not at all. We adore our pets not because they love us, but because they prove to us, day after day after day, that we love them with a purity not possible in human-to-human encounters. Our animals prove to us how capacious the human heart can be, and in doing so they give us a great gift.

    21. Will Obama Crack Down On Legal Weed?

      Paul Campos hopes Obama respects the wishes of Colorado and Washington state voters:

      Marijuana legalization may not seem like a particularly important issue. It is – because a rational approach to marijuana regulation is the first step toward treating drug addiction as a medical problem, rather than a law enforcement issue. This in turn would be an important step toward combating the catastrophic social consequences of a criminal justice system that has put an astounding 2.5 million Americans in prisons and jails on any given day.

      Allowing states to adopt more rational drug policies is the absolute minimum that progressives ought to expect out of the Obama administration in regard to such matters. When it comes to ending the federal government’s absurd war on marijuana, our plea to Barack Obama couldn’t be simpler: don’t just do something, stand there.

      Amen. If Obama's DEA follows the claptrap of this kind of thinking, they can expect a war from their base. Leave the states alone.

    22. What's Next For Romney?

      Lauren Ashburn asks around:

      Historian Douglas Brinkley, author of the bestselling book Cronkite, argues that life in politics is over for the man who could have been president. "There is no such thing as a Romney Republican," Brinkley says. The former Massachusetts governor’s move to the center and his flip-flopping on such issues as abortion, health care, and tax cuts during the campaign left many wondering just exactly what he stands for. "He’s not going to be beloved by the conservative movement. Not when you lose when unemployment is 7.9 percent."

      The obvious place for Romney to hang his hat, says Brinkley, is back in the world of business, where the Republican made a fortune as an aggressive dealmaker at Bain Capital. "The only thing he seems proficient at is making himself money," he says.

    23. America's New Realities

      David Simon heralds them:

      This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.

      Alyssa adds her two cents.

    24. Will The Right's Fever Break? Ctd

      Michael Grunwald finds little reason to think so:

      [F]or all the punditry about a coming Republican civil war, it’s not clear that the party really wants to change in any serious way — or that it could change if it wanted to. Even GOP elites, while concerned that winnable races are being sacrificed on the altar of extremism, suggest that the party is likely to stay the course that worked in 2010. Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a former Republican political consultant, has been a consistent voice for pragmatism over purity inside the party, but he doesn’t foresee any radical shifts after Tuesday’s split decision. “It’s sobering that we’re throwing away Senate seats. But I don’t see a great schism,” Cole says. “I see a very unified, very conservative party that’s very alarmed about the growth of government. Who would be the generals in our great civil war?”

    25. Poseur Alert

      "Alas, as always, the duty of the Right is to manfully endure, to survive the defeat and stubbornly oppose the vaunting foe, and so this brutal shock, this electoral catastrophe, must be absorbed and digested. At some point next week or next month or next year, then, we shall recover our morale and plot some new stratagem for the future. In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's debacle, however, it is difficult to see any glimmer of light amid the encroaching gloom. Surely, there are many Americans who now sympathize with that New York infantryman who, in the bleak winter of 1862, when the Union's Army of the Potomac was under the incompetent command of Gen. Ambrose Burnside, wrote home in forlorn complaint: 'Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak.… I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us'" - Robert Stacy McCain.

      For those who have forgotten, the Poseur Alert is awarded "for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity."

    26. How Obama Won

      A demographic breakdown:

      Most post-election demographic analysis has focused on the GOP's overwhelming loss of the Hispanic vote. Alex Massie encourages Republicans to show respect:

      I don’t disagree with Max Boot when he says it would be useful if Republicans thought again about the DREAM Act but I think doing so will not be enough to solve the GOP’s hispanic problem. Because it is not just about immigration. It is about belonging. It is about respect. It is about being part of the American family. As Matt Yglesias observes -  in a characteristically excellent post – the GOP doesn’t understand this. Remember the brouhaha over Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court? Conservative snake-oil salesmen rushed to portray her as an “affirmative action” pick who was, anyway, some kind of racist because she had the temerity to suggest that her own background might prove a useful qualification for a place on the court. You don’t need to be an illegal immigrant to be annoyed by that.

      Tomasky thinks Republicans need a new platform:

      Latino people, like people generally, aren't stupid. Allegiance comes from substance. It's pretty simple. It doesn't come from symbolism or rhetoric. As I got in the car yesterday morning, I heard a guy on NPR talking, didn't catch his name, and he was talking about Republicans and blacks. He said basically: If Republicans want people of color to vote for them, they have to change their policies. They've been saying to blacks, for example, get off that Democratic plantation and join us. Well, that's absurd. Democrats' didn't get the allegiance of women by hectoring them, by saying take off that apron, GOP housewives, and join us. They won it with policies.

      Ruy Teixeira believes the GOP's new Hispanic-friendly policies need to go beyond immigration reform:

      I wrote a piece arguing that [GOP stances on immigration], in terms of projecting hostility toward that population, it clearly hurt them. But I also thought if you looked at Hispanics’ other opinions — opinions on the economy and opinions on the role of government, on education — just look at a wide variety of views on who can handle the economy, they’re very much aligned with the Democratic Party, and an activist view of government, and not with the hardcore, quasi-libertarian approach of the Republicans, which putting Paul Ryan on the ticket seemed to underscore. It wasn’t just immigration, but the general Republican stance on the role of government. I don’t think it just needs to be moving to the center on immigration, though that would certainly help. It needs to move on the role of government.

      TNC adds:

      I am hearing a great deal of talk about "appealing to Hispanics" and "appealing to women." But I am not hearing much about endorsing actual policies. What happened [Tuesday] night is not a matter of cosmetics. This is not false consciousness. This a real response to real policies. Mitt Romney actually endorsed Arizona's immigration policies. You can't fix this by flashing more pictures of brown people.

    27. Will The Right's Fever Break? Ctd

      When you have divided the world into two categories - freedom or tyranny - and there is no ground whatever between them, you are not only among the least intelligent commentators out there; you also have to be completely fanatical even in the face of popular repudiation.

      I watched Fox last night. Every pore on Sean Hannity's face quivered. He seemed close to tears at times. He blamed EdmundBurke1771Obama for a horribly negative campaign. He basically told the majority of Americans who voted for a president Hannity actually seems to believe is the worst in modern times that they will now deserve their enslaved state.

      The performance artist, Ann Coulter, just Etch-A-Sketched immediately to 2014. She cannot process the past, and yet she preposterously calls herself a conservative. Her gig is attacking - in the crudest, snarkiest, most cynical fashion - anything she can decide to call "liberal". To ask her to reflect retroactively on a massive realigning loss for her kind of slash-and-burn conservatism was to ask her to do something she has no capacity to do.

      O'Reilly was fascinating and immediately explained the result as a function of there being too many black and Latino and young voters who voted for "free stuff." At no point last night did anyone on Fox even mention the four democratic victories for marriage equality across the country. When they referred to the Colorado marijuana legalization, they cut to a teenager bragging that he was going to get stoned tonight. William F Buckley was in favor of legalization. These performers had no argument as such; they just had contempt.

      Yes, I watched for Schadenfreude purposes. These charlatans and money-grubbers have turned the broad tradition of Anglo-American conservatism into Southern Fried Fanaticism - and I wanted to see them crackle in their batter. They have replaced empirical doubt with unerring faith in an ideology that had its moment over thirty years ago and is barely relevant to the world we now live in. That faith has been cynically fused with fundamentalist religion to make it virtually impossible for the GOP to accept that women are the majority of voters in this country, that gay couples are equal to straight ones, that 11 million illegal immigrants simply cannot be expected to "self-deport" en masse by a regime of terrifying policing, that war is a last and not a first resort, that the debt we have is primarily a function of two things: George W. Bush's presidency and the economic collapse his term ended with.

      This kind of total fanaticism about an ideology that bears no resemblance to Burkean conservatism is often called religious. But the truly religious person is not focused on the Electoral College math, but on living her own life the right way in accordance with the God she worships. She is not obsessed with policing society to keep the "other" at bay - the homosexual, the African-American, the Latino immigrant, the single mother, the young straight dude who is truly baffled by the anachronisms of homophobia and the belief that alcohol is less harmful than marijuana. She knows that living a good life is hard enough without controlling the lives and fates and dignity of others.

      But the person who fuses Manichean political warfare with theological certitude cannot, will not, abandon that stance for pragmatic purposes - because there is no greater evil than pragmatism for the fanatic. A political party can adapt and change; a fundamentalist religious party loses its entire authority if it admits error, because its message is based on religious texts that are held to be inerrant. The biggest obstacle in front of today's GOP threfore remains theo-political fundamentalism, and how it can be overcome.

      Listen to its tone, hear its anger, and absorb its utter irrelevance to anything but fantasy and delusion and mania:

      We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

      We are the alternative. We will resist. We're not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We're not good losers, you better believe we're sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we're called 'purists.' Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We're purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

      You know what, Mr Levin? The "crap" coming your way has only just begun.

    28. Turns Out It's Not A Great Idea To Campaign On Rape

      Shuts-the-whole-thing-down

      Rounding up a list of politicians who made reckless remarks about rape this election season, Erin Gloria Ryan declares that "team rape lost big [Tuesday] night". Amy Sullivan says it wasn't so much the messengers as the GOP's underlying message: 

      Mourdock and Akin lost because they each made the mistake of actually trying to explain an increasingly common position by Republican officer-holders, including Paul Ryan.... It’s not unusual for GOP politicians to oppose rape exceptions. But they haven’t previously had to defend that position—at least not on a big stage. When they are forced to explain themselves, as in the case of Akin and Mourdock, it’s not their words that alienate voters, but the idea of forcing women to carry to term a pregnancy that began in rape.

      Nona Willis Aronowitz shows why the comments from "team rape" were especially damaging:

      According to exit polls, it was 18 percent, an even bigger margin than the 12 percent gender gap in 2008. In crucial swing states like Ohio, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, Obama’s lead with the ladies helped tip the scale in his favor.

      Alana Goodman examines how lightning rods like Akin got to be nominees in the first place:

      Read On »

    29. Quote for the Day

      "The billionaire donors I hear are livid ... There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do ... I don't know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing," - A "Republican operative," to HuffPo.

    30. The Legalization Timeline

      Jacob Sullum reports on the next steps for Washington's and Colorado's marijuana legalization laws. On Colorado:

      The new law requires the department to begin processing license applications by October and to start issuing licenses by January 2014. “We say the licenses can be issued as soon as October 2013," says Brian Vicente, co-director of the Yes on 64 campaign. "Given the way government runs, we say they must be issued by January 2014. Our best guess is that it's 2014 when these stores will be opening up."

      Read On »

    31. Will The Right's Fever Break?

      Heritage is promising to double down on obstruction:

      Massie rounds up The Corner's reality-deficient responses to Obama's victory:

      [W]hat these eight responses demonstrate is the extent to which too many conservatives believed their own propaganda. This is what it’s like to live in a cocoon. The apparent inability to appreciate why any sane person might contemplate voting for Barack Obama is evidence of, well, of the closing of the conservative mind.

      Hence the recourse to fantasies of the sort that leave the average, sober-minded voter wondering just what kind of crazy juice you’re hooked on. Obama wants to make the United States a kind of France? Check. Obama wants to crush religious liberty in America? Check. Our colleges are indoctrinating yet another generation of sadly-impressionable young American minds? Check. (Bonus: perhaps it would be better and certainly safer if fewer Americans risked going to college!) There is a War Against Americanism and Barack Obama is the enemy general? Check. The media are hoodwinking poor, gullible Americans? Check. Universal healthcare is the road to serfdom? Check. The people, damn them, are too stupid to know any better and deserve what they get? The fools. Check.

      Drum fears that the GOP won't "back down from their all-obstruction-all-the-time agenda" and we will have "four years of faux drama and trench warfare."

    32. Chart Of The Day

      Buying_Election

      Jennifer Victor tallies spending, using data available on election day:

      These totals represent a nearly equal game between the candidates.  However, this may not be a fair comparison. The totals for the individual candidates are money raised, not spent (as of Election Day), and the IE total includes money from the Republican primaries.  Also, money spent by the parties on behalf of their standard bearers are not included here.

      Some evidence suggests that the Obama team slightly outspent the Romney team.  But for now, it is safe to conclude that the election was not "bought." 

    33. If Nature Were A Terrorist

      Eric Roston argues that Hurricane Sandy, like 9/11, sounded the alarm that "New York, as a proxy for the United States, is unprepared for anticipated 21st century threats":

      The storm is different. Sandy elicits no moral shock of war, no blinding national insult, "no unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury," as a columnist put it in Time magazine after 9/11. Instead we're up against something much more elusive, an enemy we're much more poorly equipped to deal with than sleeper terrorist cells: the Earth.

      "No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."

    34. The Writer At Rest

      3445115962_28c3ab2c7f_b

      Alexis Hauk surveys the burial sites of America's most beloved writers:

      Unlike the luminaries housed at more elegant cemeteries, like Pere Lachaise in Paris (Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright), many literary stars lie for eternity in simpler, plainer spots around this country, with traditions around how to commemorate them as widely varied as the genres they comprise. Some have touching or amusing epitaphs—Charles Bukowski's is "Don't try." The flamboyant persona of Truman Capote, meanwhile, might shudder at the simplicity of his grave marker: His ashes are noted with a plaque on the wall in a cemetery in Westwood Memorial in Los Angeles. (His proximity to the graves of Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe might make him smile from that great Tiffany's in the sky). ...

      Read On »

    35. The Tuneless Commute

      Josh Levin considers the perils, and ethics, of wearing headphones while bicycling. His bottom line:

      “Like motorists who insist that they can safely text and drive,” wrote Bicycling.com’s Neil Bezdek last December, “perhaps cyclists should skip the headphones simply because it’s unfair to take unnecessary risks in other people’s road space, regardless of personal risk tolerance.” Riding a bike during rush hour is perilous. The best way to mitigate that danger is to avoid as many distractions as possible. And music is a highly avoidable distraction.

    36. The Coffee Ring Effect

      Explained:

      Drop a bit of detergent, and chances are it'll dry with all the particles spread evenly throughout the area that was once a puddle. The same with a muddy pool -- when it dries, you don't see the bits of mud all swept to the outer lip. But when you dissolve coffee grounds in water, then spill the suspension, a very physical rearrangement happens: the grounds go from being evenly dispersed throughout the liquid, to being clumped crustily on the edges when it dries. Scientists call this the “coffee ring effect” (though full disclosure, coffee isn't actually the only liquid to do the ring thing -- you’ll know from evening cocktails that red wine will do the same to your linoleum).

      How it works:

      Read On »

    37. "The Nerdiest Election In The History Of The American Republic"

      That's what Ackerman calls it. Sasha Issenberg explains why the Democrats' data operation excelled:

      If Republicans brought consumer data into politics during Bush’s re-election, Democrats are mastering the techniques that give campaigns the ability to understand what actually moves voters. As a result, Democrats are beginning to engage a wider set of questions about what exactly a campaign is capable of accomplishing in an election year: not just how to modify nonvoters’ behavior to get them to the polls, but what exactly can change someone’s mind outside of the artificial confines of a focus group.

      Michael Scherer has more details:

      Read On »

    38. The Pooch Index

      Brazil-small-dogs1

      Quartz had a whole series last week on the canine economy, since "dog ownership, like cocaine use, can be seen as an economic indicator." South America is a major player:

      Today, four countries—Chile, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—rank in the world’s top 10 for household penetration. The average home in those countries is more likely to have a pooch than not have one. Brazil tops the list in absolute terms, with nearly 36 million pups—more dogs than Canada has people. Some 55% of those dogs weigh less than 20 pounds (9.1 kilos), as tiny terriers, shih tzus, and chihuahuas fit with the lives of the 85% of Brazilians who live in cramped urban areas. Brazilian dogs are taken in droves to be blessed by priests in honor of St. Francis of Assis; a few are even ferried about in "pet taxis," taken for dog face lifts, or brought to breed in a doggie "love motel."

      A subsequent post finds that Europeans, specifically Norwegians, spend the most to feed their dogs.

    39. The Horserace Next Time

      Jason Zengerle worries about it:

      What’s most problematic about Silver’s and the pollsters’ triumph last night is what it may herald for the future of campaign coverage. Without a doubt, Silver’s rigorous empiricism is much, much more preferable to the lazy, gassy, vibration-sensing punditry that has made up so much of our political journalism. And yet, the biggest complaint about campaign coverage over the last twenty years has been that it’s too focused on the horse race and doesn’t pay enough attention to the substance. Silver and his fellow polling analysts and aggregators have brought a welcome degree of precision, but they’ve only made the horse race more central to the political conversation. After all, what dominated that conversation for the past month? It wasn’t a conversation about the candidate’s dueling tax plans. Rather, it was a debate about the polls. The fact that the good guys — who put their faith in the data rather than the vibrations — won that debate may turn out to be something of a pyrrhic victory.

    40. The Daily Wrap

      Colbert-550wi

      Today on the Dish, after Obama's speech reminded Andrew how "deeply American" the president is, Andrew hailed last night as a BFD for marriage equality, underscored Dick Morris' buffoonery, and read Rove's going rogue as a debacle for Roger Ailes. Readers reacted to the big win for Obama, Twitter captured the drama as results came in, and readers meep-meeped. Ezra Klein analyzed Obama's speech, Dan Savage reflected on the ground broken on gay equality, Alex Ross ruminated on Obama's role in delivering those colossal gains and, on the downside, most of New York's pro-equality Republicans fell. As we looked back at Andrew's views on pot legalization, the end of prohibition took root.

      In other post-election analysis, Brian Beutler examined how the GOP lost the Senate, a reader philosophized on the formation of the new "America," and Weigel explained the arrival of the Republican minority. Frum cautioned against focusing solely on immigration, while George Will touted Rubio as the GOP's great Latino hope. As Douthat called last night a "realignment," Rush Limbaugh put it quite another way. The rest of the world's newspapers reacted, Puerto Rico bid for statehood, Drezner found Obama winning the foreign policy issue handily, and Marc Lynch reality-checked Fox's Benghazi obsession. Massie, meanwhile, rounded up The Corner's responses to Obama's re-election, Friedersdorf took GOP talking heads to task, and Nate Silver seemed to be a warlock. Jonathan Cohn cheered the survival of Obamacare, Kathryn Lofton argued Romney wasn't Mormon enough, and Henry Farrell worried about the decline of polling. Mary Matlin earned a Hewitt nod while Sasha and Malia appeared more mature than Matlin.

      MHB here, a snowy NYC view here, and that lady with the American flag in her hair here. Andrew's appearance on Colbert is here if you missed it.

      - G.G.