News Nuggets 1102

DAYLEE PICTURE: Obama at a one of his final rallies.  From the Washington Post

UP-FRONT OBAMA VIDEO NUGGET!!
President Obama: "I'm Really Proud of All of You." from YouTube
Obama, the community organizer/president, acknowledges his campaign staff in Chicago in a deeply effecting and inspiring tribute!

UP-FRONT OBAMA SECOND TERM NUGGET!!
Obama's Holding the Cards on "Fiscal Cliff" (Joshua Green) from the Bloomberg News Service
"At first glance, the results of the 2012 election look like a return to the status quo: President Obama was reelected, Democrats retained the Senate, and Republicans held on to the House. But don’t be fooled. The political dynamic of the next four years will be almost exactly the opposite of the last four. ... In Obama’s second term, leverage will shift to the Democrats on almost every issue of importance. And that shift has already begun."

UP-FRONT GOP NUGGET!!
Romneyworld Reckoning Begins from Politico
"“The anger is that they were entrusted to do certain things. It’s not like they were paid a $5,000 retainer to get a few dozen articles in an inside-the-Beltway paper. This is the major leagues.” ... Romney supporters point to a series of brash statements made by advisers that seem out of touch with reality in retrospect. Inside the Beltway, Republicans trained their fire on senior Romney advisers like Ed Gillespie and political director Rich Beeson for appearances on last weekend’s Sunday shows."
On the one hand, Romney's political spin-meisters deserve every degree of heat they are receiving today both for misleading their fat-cat donors but even more for pervasive lying across the board starting at the first debate and going downhill from there.  ON THE OTHER HAND, GOP donors and voters alike have no one to blame but themselves for the delusional right-wing non-sense they have been selling (and apparently buying) for the last five years.  Jed Lewison at Daily Kos has a SPOT-ON critique of these folks HERE.  Lewison's commentary is worth quoting at length: "What a perfect encapsulation of the utter cluelessness and loathsome sense of entitlement of Romney's big money backers. It's not just that they were stupid enough to believe Romneyland's confidence (did they really expect to be told that Mitt was toast and that their money would be better spent elsewhere?), it's that they seem to believe they were hiring staff whose job was to win the election much like they might hire a pool boy to clean out the pool. And now they are really pissed off because even though they spent all this money, they see a big turd floating in the middle of the water and now they want their money back."

In case you missed it from yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf takes aim at the equally culpable right-wing media machine.  

Several other related stories:
Republican Reckoning Begins After Revealing Defeat (Jon Ward) from the Huffington Post
"Republican Party leaders on Wednesday began picking up the pieces of their movement, trying to figure how to put them back together. The GOP was blindsided Tuesday, but also revealed. The Democrats' ground organization was beyond anything they'd imagined, pulling in new voters with stunning effectiveness. It exposed a major weakness in the Republican approach to winning elections, practically and intellectually. ... The real lightning bolts being thrown on Wednesday were by the party's super donors, who played a historic role in this election after a 2010 Supreme Court decision allowed them to give unlimited amounts to outside groups."

Karl Rove, American Crossroads Spin GOP Election Losses from the Huffington Post
"Although he wasn't running for office, his Crossroads organizations spent more than $300 million on Republican candidates in the 2012 election, with some of the biggest spenders in the conservative movement putting their hopes -- and dollars -- in the care of Rove. Combined, his groups were the largest single outside force of the 2012 election. The results were bleak. According to the Sunlight Foundation, American Crossroads, Rove's super PAC, saw just a 1 percent return on its investments. Crossroads GPS, the political nonprofit arm, saw a 14 percent return."

Adviser: Romney "Shellshocked" by Loss from CBS News
A powerful heartfelt description of a campaign that had deluded itself! 
"... it wasn't until the polls closed that concern turned into alarm. They expected North Carolina to be called early. It wasn't. They expected Pennsylvania to be up in the air all night; it went early for the President. After Ohio went for Mr. Obama, it was over, but senior advisers say no one could process it. "We went into the evening confident we had a good path to victory," said one senior adviser. "I don't think there was one person who saw this coming.""

How the Secret Service Said Goodbye to Mitt Romney (Marc Ambinder) from GQ 
"At some point, early Wednesday morning, when Gov. Mitt Romney and family were tucked into bed, a quiet call went out on the radio channel used by his Secret Service agents: "Javelin, Jockey details, all posts, discontinue." Of all the indignities involved in losing a presidential race, none is more stark than the sudden emptiness of your entourage."

Republicans Start Review to Find Out What Went Wrong (Peter Wallsten) from the Washington Post
"Officials told The Washington Post that they’re planning a series of voter-based polls and focus groups, meetings with constituency group leaders, and in-depth discussions with their volunteers, donors and staff members to find ways to broaden their appeal."

Voter Suppression Backfires (Ta-Nehisi Coates) from the Atlantic
"Barack Obama knew who he was talking to when he called voting the best revenge. We don't need no high-faluting reasons to stand in those long lines. We'll stand there just for the privilege of putting that stutter in Karl Rove's speech, and that panicked look on his face."

As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage (Nate Silver) from the New York Times
"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."

Obama Claims Victory in Fla.; Romney Won't Concede from News 13
"Obama's campaign issued a statement late Thursday afternoon saying they had won Florida. The Associated Press has not called the race said it is still too close. Obama led Romney 49.9 percent to 49.3 percent or by about 52,000 votes."

How Republicans Saved Senate Democrats In 2014 from Talking Points Memo 
"Two years from now, the Senate Democrats who rode the 2008 wave into office will face re-election. In theory, this provides the GOP with large pick-up opportunities. Democrats will be defending seats everywhere they’d rather not fight: in Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia — just to name a few. ...  Their new, unexpected five seat buffer, and the GOP’s penchant for nominating unelectable Senate
candidates, means they’re not destined to lose power two years from now."

Will The Right's Fever Break? (Andrew Sullivan) from the Daily Beast 
"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."

For Republicans, Less Purity and More Reality (Alan Charles Raul) from the Washington Post
"It’s clear that drinking too much tea has left us jittery. Some lower-octane ideological purity has to be part of a new Republican movement."

Republicans: Don’t Trust Fox News! (Allison Benedikt) from Slate
"For liberals like me, Fox News was the channel to watch last night. As it became clear early on that Obama was going to take this thing, my household quickly switched the channel from CNN to Fox, eager to see the network’s massive breakdown play out in real time."

Who’s Skewed Now? Beaten GOP Wakes Up to the Real America (Andrew Romano) from the Daily Beast
"Ultraconservatives were sure the polls were wrong—and the America they knew would reject Obama the socialist Muslim. But the election proves the Real America is something quite different, says Andrew Romano."

Obama, the Fortunate One (Daniel Klaidman) from Newsweek
"Sure, Obama’s lucky. He also relentlessly seizes his chances and makes every one of them count."
Newsweek's "cover" story for this week.

2016 Election: Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush? from Politico
"American politics may be headed back to the future. Four years after the country elected a 40-something African-American newcomer named Barack to the presidency, a more familiar political order is poised to reassert itself: the House of Clinton representing Democrats and the House of Bush atop the GOP."

Election 2016: Chris Cillizza’s 13 Front-Runners (Chris Cillizza) from the Washington Post
"For political junkies, President Obama’s reelection means one thing for 2016: An open race, with candidates contesting for both major party nominations. Here’s the early line from The Fix’s Chris Cillizza on the 2016 candidates, in no particular order. So, dear readers, if it’s not too early for you, here goes:..."

Among the Top Election Quants, Nate Silver Reigns Supreme (Daniel Terdiman) from C-Net
"Not only did FiveThirtyEight's Silver pick all 50 state winners in the presidential race, he also beat out his polling aggregator rivals for sheer margin of accuracy."

MOVIE REVIEW NUGGET!!
"Lincoln" is Magnificent (Daniel O'Hehir) from Salon
"Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and an amazing cast bring history alive in Spielberg's moral masterpiece."

ICE AGE NUGGET!!
“Impeccably Preserved” Woolly Mammoth Excavated in France from Salon 
"Archaeologists near Paris Thursday excavated a nearly complete woolly mammoth skeleton. The long-dead mammoth, named “Helmut,” is considered remarkable not simply because it is “impeccably preserved” but also because neanderthal-made spearheads were discovered among the bones."