Wednesday Open Thread [11.21.12]

The worst travel day of the year. And the biggest drinking night of the year. Thanksgiving Eve is here!

Politico: “Tired of presidential politics? Get over it: Upwards of 15 prominent Republicans are privately contemplating 2016 campaigns for the presidency — and the most serious and ambitious of the bunch are already plunging in, some quite publicly.”

Greg Sargent:

When all the votes are counted, could Mitt Romney really end up achieving perfect poetic justice by finishing with 47 percent of the national vote? Yup. Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says new votes in from Maryland put Romney at 47.56 percent. He predicts with certainty that with all of New York and California counted, Romney will end up below 47.5 percent of the vote.

This is from David Simon, but go read the whole thing:

“Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.

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 the next, 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.”

Dean Chambers, the man behind the “Unskewed Polls” website, and who after the election admitted he was wrong and Nate Silver was right, has now found reality of a liberal, Democratic nation to be too upsetting for him, so he has run back into his fantasy world, and created a new website that imagines that Mitt Romney actually won the election, and had it stolen from him:

The website, www.BarackOFraudo.com, identifies four “black states” Chambers claims were stolen by President Obama through massive voter fraud and suppression operations. According to the website, Democratic ballot stuffing was the reason Obama carried the critical swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.

I especially like how he colors the fraud states “black.” When I can hear the dog whistle, you racist scum Dean Chambers, you are doing it wrong.

Rebecca Rosen highlights a new tool to target the forwarded BS in your inbox:

LazyTruth is a plug-in for Chrome that automatically scans email for information that FactCheck.org and Politifact have deemed false. If something doesn’t check out, it’ll provide a few words of correction and a link to where you can find out more. You can then easily pass that verified information on to the email’s sender. Down the road [developer Matt] Stempeck plans to add more kinds of rumors to LazyTruth’s filter — urban myths, hoaxes, false security threats, etc. — but for now the tool is limited to political tall tales.

The Economist: “The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote for divided government. It’s a clean sweep.”