About That 2016 Romney Reelection Bid

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According to this Washington Post story by Peter Wallsten, Republican poobahs are so out of touch that on Election Night,

“Party leaders said they already had planned to poll voters in battleground states starting Tuesday night in anticipation of a Mitt Romney victory—to immediately begin laying the groundwork for midterm congressional elections and a Romney 2016 reelection bid.”

I actually had to read that twice to make sure I got it right. After my double-take, it sank in that Repubs had already been planning for Mitt’s reelection! Wow–they were planning to review why they’d won, and had anticipated no other result. Even if they believed so adamantly in their certain victory–despite the objective absurdity of it–wasn’t this extremely imprudent? Isn’t it wise to hope for the best, while planning for an outcome that falls short? This is as clear an instance of epistemic closure as I’ve yet seen, even from this political party that has made hermetically-sealed stupidity their singular trademark. In the wake of what was to them an unexpected drubbing,

“Top Republican officials, stunned by the extent of their election losses Tuesday night, have [instead] begun an exhaustive review to figure out what went so wrong and how to fix it.”

But in signs of a stunningly uninsightful self-assessment to come,

Party officials said the review is aimed at studying their tactics and message, not at changing the philosophical underpinnings of the party. ‘This is no different than a patient going to see a doctor,’ said Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s spokesman. ‘Your number one thing is to say, I’m not feeling well. Tell me what the problem is. Run some tests on me.’”

Well, a majority of the American people have already delivered their diagnosis, and it ain’t a pretty picture. Republicans need to revitalize their sclerotic circulatory system by allowing their organism to be transfused with new blood that will prompt new ideas and a new way of viewing the evolving American electorate.

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Election Night on FOX, Rove Ranted & the Network Pimped Megyn Kelly

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As if more proof were needed, this Gabriel Sherman report in NY magazine, tipped to me by TPM, shows how intertwined FOX News continues to be with the Repub establishment. On Tuesday night, after FOX, following the same decision by other networks, called Ohio for President Obama, there was a meltdown on the right, culminating in Karl Rove’s rant on camera, when he sounded like a spoiled child who wanted his toys back:

“Instantly, FOX phones lit up with angry phone calls and e-mails from the Romney campaign, who believed that the call was premature, since tallies in several Republican-leaning Southern counties hadn’t been been fully tabulated. ‘The Romney people were totally screaming that we’re totally wrong,’ one FOX source said. ‘To various people, they were saying, ‘your decision team is wrong.’ According to a FOX insider, Rove had been in contact with the Romney people all night. After the Ohio call, Rove—whose super-PAC had spent as much as $300 million on the election, to little avail—took their complaints public, conducting an on-air primer on Ohio’s electoral math in disputing the call.

I guess phone numbers of FOX senior producers is something Repub operatives are given when they get hired.

Sherman’s story also makes clear how willing FOX is to dangle and pimp their on-air female talent before male viewers.  In an impromptu episode that followed Rove’s refusal to accept the Ohio call for Obama, FOX producers sent host Megyn Kelly on a bizarre expedition down the hall to conduct an interview with the experts staffing the network’s election decision desk. Sherman reports that,

“One idea was for two members of the decision team, Mishkin and Fox’s digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt, to go on camera with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier to squelch the doubts over the call. But then it was decided that Kelly would walk through the office and interview the decision team in the conference room. ‘This is Fox News,’ an insider said, ‘so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.’ The decision desk were given a three-minute warning that Kelly would be showing up.”

This isn’t a network, it’s a burlesque show.

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Grateful

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Grateful, relieved, happy, and hopeful for so many things, a handful of them below:

1) Grateful that our president will be returned to office with the support of a majority of the nation’s voters; that so many progressive women will be serving in the Senate; and that marriage equality has been affirmed on the east coast and the west coast.

2) Relieved that the policies and cohort of the challenger won’t be installed in the White House.

3) Happy that I was able to lend my support to the Obama campaign with some phone banking (not as much as in 2008, though I still made some calls); that I connected with the Obama Campaign’s digital outreach staff, especially Teddy Goff and Erica Sackin, and was able to inform this blog with their informed content; and that the curation and writing of this blog spread accurate information and motivating commentary about the campaign to a widening circle of readers and sharers. Thanks to all.

4) Hopeful that four more years of President Obama’s astute leadership will heal our economy with more opportunities for all; nurture civil and human rights; and lead to more global understanding.

As this first day after the 2012 election goes along, I may have more items to list, but for now these will suffice. As always, thank you for subscribing, reading, and sharing from The Great Gray Bridge. If you care to, please share some things for which you are grateful, relieved, happy, and/or hopeful in the comments field below.

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A PA Voting Machine Changes an Obama Vote to Romney

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Via PoliticalWire.com I see that Zachary Roth of NBC News is reporting on a voter in PA who uploaded a brief video of a worrisome glitch on the voting machine he was using. Under a youtube account name ‘centralpavoter,’ he left a very reasonable-sounding comment just below. He doesn’t claim anything more than what he observed, but what happened is disturbing. Please note that Roth reports the machine was taken out of use, after ‘centralpavoter’ alerted officials to the problem.

“My wife and I went to the voting booths this morning before work. There were 4 older ladies running the show and 3 voting booths that are similar to a science fair project in how they fold up. They had an oval VOTE logo on top center and a cartridge slot on the left that the volunteers used to start your ballot.

I initially selected Obama but Romney was highlighted. I assumed it was being picky so I deselected Romney and tried Obama again, this time more carefully, and still got Romney. Being a software developer, I immediately went into troubleshoot mode. I first thought the calibration was off and tried selecting Jill Stein to actually highlight Obama. Nope. Jill Stein was selected just fine. Next I deselected her and started at the top of Romney’s name and started tapping very closely together to find the ‘active areas’. From the top of Romney’s button down to the bottom of the black checkbox beside Obama’s name was all active for Romney. From the bottom of that same checkbox to the bottom of the Obama button (basically a small white sliver) is what let me choose Obama. Stein’s button was fine. All other buttons worked fine.
I asked the voters on either side of me if they had any problems and they reported they did not. I then called over a volunteer to have a look at it. She him hawed for a bit then calmly said “It’s nothing to worry about, everything will be OK.” and went back to what she was doing. I then recorded this video.
There is a lot of speculation that the footage is edited. I’m not a video guy, but if it’s possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so. The jumping frames are a result of the shitty camera app on my Android phone, nothing more.”
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This is the .18 sec video:

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Unsettling Report on Last-Minute Installation of New Vote Reporting Software in Ohio

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Tuesday Update: The AP’s reporting today that U.S District Court Judge Gregory Frost has refused to hear the lawsuit brought by Ohioans Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello over the last-minute installation of new vote reporting software by Secretary of State Jon Husted. Husted’s conduct throughout the campaign has been despicable.
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Evening Update: TheBradBlog’s post, which I’d linked to earlier today, has been cross-published in Salon.com. I’m glad to see this puzzling matter of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s installation of new vote reporting software getting noticed before voting day tomorrow.
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Just saw this tweet from indie journalist Dan Gillmor alerting his followers to this post on the Brad blog about a new piece of software that Ohio Secretary of State John Husted has installed very recently into Ohio’s vote tabulating system. I quickly retweeted Gillmor’s tweet. Here are the first eight paragraphs from Brad Friedman’s post, with links to earlier reporting on this story:

“Last week, Bob Fitrakis and Gerry Bello at FreePress.org reported an important story concerning what they described as “uncertified ‘experimental’ software patches” being installed at the last minute on electronic vote tabulation systems in 39 Ohio counties.

The story included a copy of the contract [PDF] between Republican Ohio Sec. of State Jon Husted’s office and ES&S, the nation’s largest e-voting system manufacturer, for a new, last minute piece of software created to the custom specifications of the Sec. of State. The contract itself describes the software as ‘High-level enhancements to ES&S’ election reporting software that extend beyond the current features and functionality of the software to facilitate a custom-developed State Election Results Reporting File.’

A subsequent story at The Free Press the following day included text said to be from a November 1 memo sent from the OH SoS Election Counsel Brandi Laser Seske to a number of state election officials confirming the use of the new, uncertified software on Ohio’s tabulator systems. The memo claims that ‘its function is to aid in the reporting of results” by converting them “into a format that can be read by the Secretary of State’s election night reporting system.’

On Friday evening, at Huffington Post, journalist Art Levine followed up with a piece that, among other things, advanced the story by breaking the news that Fitrakis and his attorney Cliff Arnebeck were filing a lawsuit for an immediate injunction against Husted and ES&S to ‘halt the use of secretly installed, unauthorized ‘experimental’ software in 39 counties’ tabulators’. Levine also reported that Arnebeck had referred the matter to the Cincinnati FBI for criminal investigation of what the Ohio attorney describes as ‘a flagrant violation of the law.’

‘Before you add new software, you need approval of a state board,’ says Arnebeck. ‘They are installing an uncertified, suspect software patch that interfaces between the county’s vote tabulation equipment and state tabulators.’ Arnebeck’s alarm is understandable.

Since the story initially broke, I’ve been trying to learn as much as I could about what is actually going on here. During that time, a few in the mainstream media have gotten wind of the story as well, including NBC News and CNN, and have been able to press Husted and other officials in his office into finally responding to the concerns publicly. The Ohio officials have attempted to downplay the concerns, though in doing so, they appear to have given misleading information which, at times, seems to conflict even with the contract itself.

I’ve also spoken to computer scientists and election integrity experts, in trying to make sense of all of this, though many of them seem to be scratching their heads as well. My own queries to the Sec. of State’s office have gone unanswered, as had Fitrakis’ and Bello’s before they published their initial story, begging the question as to why, if this software is as benign as Ohio officials are suggesting, they didn’t respond immediately to say as much. Furthermore, why did they keep the contract a secret? Why did they wait until just before the election to have this work done? And why did they feel it was appropriate to circumvent both federal and state testing and certification programs for the software in the bargain?

And, just to pre-respond to those supposed journalists who have shown a proclivity for reading comprehension issues, let me be clear: No, this does not mean I am charging that there is a conspiracy to rig or steal the Ohio election. While there certainly could be, if there is, I don’t know about it, nor am I charging there is any such conspiracy at this time. The secretive, seemingly extra-legal way in which SoS Husted’s office is going about whatever it is they are trying to do, however, at the very last minute before the election, along with the explanations they’ve given for it to date, and concerns about similar cases in the past, in both Ohio and elsewhere, are certainly cause for any reasonable skeptic or journalist to be suspect and investigate what could be going on. And so I am…”
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I will be watching for updates on this story, especially the lawsuit filed by Fitrakis and Arnebeck that’s been filed seeking an injunction to prevent use of the new software. The odious Mr. Husted is also in court today, with national DEMs trying to prevent him from enacting an onerous burden on voters who use provisional ballots. A ruling is expected on that before voting day tomorrow.

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“We Know What Real Change Looks Like & We Can’t Give Up Now”

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Back on the campaign trail this morning, President Obama is making a forceful closing argument for his re-election. The remarks in the video below were just delivered at a rally in Green Bay, WI, under the rubric “We Know What Real Change Looks Like & We Can’t Give Up Now”. For convenience, I’ve also pasted in a transcript of his talk. Key passage: “After four years as president, you know me by now. You may not agree with every decision I’ve made. You may be frustrated at the pace of change, but you know what I believe. You know where I stand. You know I’m willing to make tough decisions even when they’re not politically convenient, and you know I’ll fight for you and your families every single day as hard as I know how. You know that. I know what change looks like because I have fought for it. You have too. After all we’ve been through together, we sure as heck can’t give up now.”

“Now, in the closing weeks of this campaign,  Governor Romney has been using all his talents as a salesman to dress up these very same policies that failed our country so badly, the very same policies we’ve been cleaning up after for the past four years, and he is offering them up as change. He is saying he is the candidate of change. Well, let me tell you, Wisconsin, we know what change looks like. What the Governor is offering sure ain’t change. Getting more power back to the biggest banks isn’t change. Leaving millions without health insurance isn’t change. Another $5 trillion tax cut that favors the wealthy isn’t change. Turning Medicare into a voucher is change, but we don’t want that change. Refusing to answer questions about the details of your policies isn’t change. Ruling out compromise by pledging to rubber stamp the tea party’s agenda as president, that’s definitely not change. In fact, that’s exactly the attitude in Washington that needs to go.

Here’s the thing, Wisconsin. After four years as president, you know me by now. You may not agree with every decision I’ve made. You may be frustrated at the pace of change, but you know what I believe. You know where I stand. You know I’m willing to make tough decisions even when they’re not politically convenient, and you know I’ll fight for you and your families every single day as hard as I know how. You know that. I know what change looks like because I have fought for it. You have too. After all we’ve been through together, we sure as heck can’t give up now. Change is a country where Americans of every age have the skills and education that good jobs now require. Government can’t do this alone, but don’t tell me that hiring more teachers won’t help this economy grow or help young people compete. Don’t tell me that students who can’t afford college can just borrow money from their parents. That wasn’t an option for me. I’ll bet it wasn’t an option for a whole lot of you. We shouldn’t be ending college tax credits to pay for millionaires’ tax cuts. We should be making college more affordable for everyone who is willing to work for it. We should recruit 100,000 math and science teachers so that high-tech, high-wage jobs aren’t created in China. They’re created right here in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We should work with community colleges to claim another two million Americans with skills that businesses are looking for right now. That’s my plan for the future. That’s what change is. That’s the America we’re fighting for in this election.”

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New Features at The Great Gray Bridge, One Year Old Today

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Today October 30, the day after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City, is the one-year anniversary of The Great Gray Bridge. To mark this occasion, I’ve installed some new features here that will make it easier for you to to read and share the content I create and publish. First, as you’ll see near the top of the right-hand column, you may now “Sign up to get posts by email”–which means you can by signing up there  get every new post I publish sent directly to your email inbox. If you sign up for this option, you may easily forward a post to any of your own contacts, people who may not yet know about The Great Gray Bridge. If you do entrust me with your email address in this fashion, I promise to not sell or give your info to any third party. And, if, for any reason you want to unsubscribe later, you may just click “unsubscribe” at the bottom of any the emailed posts sent from the site.

I should add that you don’t have to do any of this–if you enjoy visiting the site periodically to see what’s new and surfing around, please continue doing that.

Second, above the email sign-in window, is a grid with active buttons to connect with all of my social media accounts, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, tumblr, Pinterest, and an RSS feed from this site. I will be rolling out other new features in the weeks ahead, such as a youtube channel connected to The Great Gray Bridge.

After years curating publishing lists that reflected my understanding about what people wanted to read, and editing the words of other writers, it is a joy to be writing on my own, to publish it here, and to share it throughout our inter-connected world. Thank you very much for reading and sharing what I publish.

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Mitt’s Desperate Moves in Ohio Draw Rebuke from Chrysler/Now GM Too

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No sooner had I posted and shared my first post this afternoon on the latest of Mitt’s bogus claims on the auto bailout than Greg Sargent posted the audio of an obnoxious new Romney radio ad with a new version of the Jeep-moving-production-to-China lie.

So I’d posted on the rebuke Mitt Romney had drawn from Chrysler, first reported on by the Detroit News. Now I see that even GM is weighing in on the matter, in tweets below. Romney’s over-the-top rhetoric and false caricature of what the automakers know to be the truth about the auto rescue, and their dealings with China, has both companies burned. Mitt the businessman is showing himself given to alienating fellow businesspersons.  He went to London, and insulted the British–now he’s pissing off his own crowd, corporations and their chief officers, for the improbability of scoring some political points less than a week before Election Day. He’s not only lying about his opponent, President Obama, but also making up such crap about the carmakers that they’re mad at him, and taking the unusual step of getting involved in a potentially partisan political spat.

This then from TPM, in a story about how badly the Jeep malarkey is playing with voters, the mainstream political press, like Ron Fournier of the AP, and now the car makers. The tweets below are from David Shepardson, whose Detroit News reporting I also quoted in the first of this afternoon’s posts. I’m following him now, as his Twitter feed is great on all this stuff.

“Update: GM isn’t happy with Romney’s suggestion that the auto rescue benefitted China over America, either. Via Detroit News reporter David Sherpardson:

David Shepardson@davidshepardson
GM responds to new Romney radio ad: “At this stage, we’re looking at a Hubble telescope-length distances between campaign ads and reality”
30 Oct 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
David Shepardson@davidshepardson
More GM on Romney ad: “GM’s creating jobs in the US and repatriating profits back to this country should be a source of bipartisan pride”
30 Oct 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite

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