Tag Archives: Ohio

Boehner Should Thank God, Literally

WaPo reports* that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) barely survived a coup attempt this past January only because some of the GOP members who supported him prayed the night before the vote and believed God told them Boehner should stay.

* House Republicans broken into fighting factions,” Paul Kane

GOP Looks to Win Ugly

The GOP plan to win presidential elections by allocating electoral college votes based on congressional districts rather than winner-take-all in states Obama won twice is finally getting attention.  Rachel Maddow has been raising the alarm, and here’s Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

“Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even though they got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.

“In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.

“Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.

“This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But… if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.

“Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.

“This is happening.”

Got that?  Mittens would be president today with five million fewer votes than Obama.  If the GOP can’t win with women and minorities, they’ll just win with gerrymandering.  Be afraid, be very afraid.  They know demographics are against them, but if they soften their crazier stands, they will lose their base.  So desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is pretty damn desperate.

Ohio Looks to Get It Right — Far Right — In 2016

Y’all remember John Husted, the GOP Secretary of State in Ohio, and all his efforts to suppress the presidential vote and help Mitt, first by pushing Voter ID and then by trying to restrict early voting.  It took federal judges to rein this zealous moron in.

But Husted is nothing, if not tenacious.  His new bright idea is that Ohio’s 18 electoral vote be allocated by congressional district, rather than winner-take-all.  Ohio’s districts have been so insanely gerrymandered to favor the GOP that even though Obama won Ohio’s votes, if Husted’s proposed system had been in place, Obama would have gotten only 6 electoral votes, and Mitt would have gotten 12.

Instead of stopping people from voting or allocating their votes unreasonably, why doesn’t the GOP try to win by, oh, I don’t know, maybe offering some good ideas, maybe not pissing off women and Hispanics and African Americans and people who live in cities or on a coast?  Just a thought, people.

 

Yet Mitt Still Lost Ohio…

We all know Mittens lost Ohio.  But you can’t say GOP Secretary of State John Husted didn’t try.

Having failed to get Voter ID and to limit early voting in Dem areas, he tried to keep provisional ballots from being counted unless the voter indicated what type of ID he or she was using.

A federal judge found that Husted violated both the Constitution and Ohio election law.

What a sleaze this guy is.  I’m sure he was expecting a job in the Romney Administration.  He certainly would have deserved one — he was willing to do pretty much anything to get Mitt elected.

If You Tell A Big Lie…

During the campaign, Mitt was a robot trying to be a human.  During his concession speech, he was a human trying to be a robot, to hide his raging feelings and just get through the damn thing and get off the stage.

Meanwhile, I was trying to feel sorry for him, but I just couldn’t do it.

I kept thinking of all the lies he’d told during the campaign, from his very first ad where he showed Obama quoting McCain, but making it look as if they were Obama’s own words, not a quote.  Then we had lies like saying Obama’s welfare reforms eliminated the work requirement and all the “You didn’t build it” crap.  Finally, he ended with the false claim that Jeep was shipping American jobs to China, intended to help Mitt win Ohio.

Mitt’s campaign clearly believed that if you tell a big lie often enough, people will come to believe it.   But Mitt’s big loss shows that if you tell a big lie often enough, people will come to believe you are a liar.

What Exit Polls Showing

Matt Drudge is reporting that exit polls show Mitt winning North Carolina and Florida; O winning New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada; and toss-ups in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, and Iowa.

Remember to keep your eyes on Hillsborough County, Florida and Hamilton and Montgomery Counties in Ohio.