I don't see how anyone is surprised, it's a very anti incumbent "throw the bums out kind of mood". As for the whining about the Dems didn't explain correctly about how TARP was good, about how the stimulus cut taxes, etc. Obama to his detriment underestimated two things: One he assumed the majority of this country are fairly intelligent and well informed. Being the internet President he thought that since we now have unlimited amounts of news, facts, and figures at our fingertips that the populace is now better informed. What he failed to understand is that while the facts are available Americans do not want to read them and wouldn't understand them if they did. The internet has created a monster; we are now inundated with facts and figures and feel obligated to have an opinion on things we don't really understand and do not properly research. In years past people may have been honest when questioned about something like the stimulus package and said "I don't know enough about it to have an opinion." but now there is no excuse, all of this legislation is in your face 24 hours a day. I feel really sorry for Obama he must be exasperated at polls showing people think he raised taxes or that TARP has not been repaid. It's his fault for having faith in the intelligence of the people of this country. Two he underestimated, as I think everyone did, how bad this economic downturn would be. His promise of pass the stimulus and UE would drop to 8% was foolhardy. It provides a perfect talking point to show him as a liar or incompetent. However the stimulus was still very very effective because without it local governments would have gone bankrupt and many many more people would have lost their jobs. So he may have gotten the 2% drop he wanted because UE may have gone to 12% without the stimulus or higher. I think Obama has learned quite a bit. He has resigned himself to the fact that many of his policies will bear long term fruit. History will bear this out though in the short term he will continue to suffer the slings and arrows of the ignorant. Similar to Medicare, SS, the stimulus and HCR set a lot of things in motion that IMO will become bedrocks of our great nation once people see them in action. Anyway, I have a very positive outlook for the future. HCR will not be repealed and once people get a taste of insurance companies that can't drop them for preexisting conditions and 20 somethings that don't have to go without insurance because they make 10 bucks an hour and can now stay on their parent's policies they will throw anyone out who speaks against it. Next we need to rebuild the manufacturing base in this country with green energy. The stimulus provided a lot of funding but there needs to be a more a lot more. Cheer up fellow Dems, Obama will be relected in 2012 because the economy will be roaring once again!
A state almost completely controlled by liberal progressive Democrats and also almost bankrupt. A state almost completely controlled by Republicans that has weathered the recession fairly well. If the Tea Party gained complete control of a state they would fair well under their control
Can't see the pic or whatever it is...which state is it that has weathered the recession fairly well?
You keep repeating this stupid crap and people are bound to believe it eventually. The truth is a bit different though. Texas is facing $18 billion budget shortfall http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7001539.html
3 incumbent republicans lost in the house and 0 in the senate. How can you call that anti-incumbent and not anti-democrat?
Not that we didn't know this before. Spending blitz by outside groups helped secure big GOP wins Hedge fund moguls helped bankroll groups' attack ads, sources tell NBC News A tightly coordinated effort by outside Republican groups, spearheaded by Karl Rove and fueled by tens of millions of dollars in contributions from Wall Street hedge fund moguls and other wealthy donors, helped secure big GOP midterm victories Tuesday, according to campaign spending figures and Republican fundraising insiders. Leading the GOP spending pack was a pair of groups — American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS — both of which were co-founded by two former aides in the George W. Bush White House: Rove, and Ed Gillespie. Together, the groups — which are not formally part of the Republican Party — spent more than $38 million on attack ads and campaign mailings against Democrats, according to figures compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending in congressional races. A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said. A tightly coordinated effort by outside Republican groups, spearheaded by Karl Rove and fueled by tens of millions of dollars in contributions from Wall Street hedge fund moguls and other wealthy donors, helped secure big GOP midterm victories Tuesday, according to campaign spending figures and Republican fundraising insiders. Leading the GOP spending pack was a pair of groups — American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS — both of which were co-founded by two former aides in the George W. Bush White House: Rove, and Ed Gillespie. Together, the groups — which are not formally part of the Republican Party — spent more than $38 million on attack ads and campaign mailings against Democrats, according to figures compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending in congressional races. A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said. The Crossroads affiliates and similar groups were formed after a controversial Supreme Court ruling in January that permitted outside political groups to collect unlimited contributions from corporations, labor unions and other wealthy donors and use them directly on campaign ads. In addition, groups that were organized as nonprofit “advocacy” organizations (such as Crossroads GPS) did not have to disclose the identity of their donors. As a result, the airwaves this campaign season were flooded with millions of dollars in attack ads, paid for by secret donors. Out of nearly $300 million spent on congressional campaigns ads by both parties, 42 percent were funded by undisclosed donors, according to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics. Advertisement | ad info Just behind the Crossroads groups in outside spending on the GOP-side were the Chamber of Commerce ($31 million) and the American Action Network ($14 million), according to Sunlight Foundation figures. Neither disclosed the identity of its donors. While outside Democratic groups belatedly tried to mimic the GOP efforts, they fell short. America’s Families First Action Fund, a group founded by a number of former Democratic strategists that operated much like American Crossroads, wasn’t organized until last summer and spent just $5.5 million — $1 million of which came from a non-disclosing nonprofit affiliate, according to the Sunlight Foundation. The big outside spenders on the Democratic side were labor unions such as AFSME ($10.7 million) and the SEIU ($10 million.) Groups coordinated spending, insiders say In addition to the spending advantage, outside GOP groups like the Crossroads groups, Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth coordinated their efforts, divvying up which groups would spend in which races at which times. The groups’ leaders would meet and talk regularly in sessions often led by Rove or one of his associates, according to the two GOP fundraising sources familiar with how the organizations worked. Spending by outside groups linked to both parties The coordination could be seen in spending patterns in key Senate races. In Illinois, for example, GOP winner Mark Kirk benefited from $5.5 million in attack ads from the Crossroads groups targeting his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias. In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the Crossroads groups didn’t spend any money, but the Chamber of Commerce spent $748,000 on attack ads that helped defeat Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold. (Feingold, ironically, was co-author of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law whose restrictions on advertisements by outside groups was overturned by the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, paving the way for the creation of groups such as American Crossroads.) The long term impact of the spending by the outside groups during this election will be to lay the groundwork for an even bigger effort during the presidential campaign two years from now. That will substantially diminish the role of the two political parties, according to campaign finance experts. Other than running primaries, “who needs (political parties)?” asked Brett Kappel, a Washington lawyer who specializes in campaign finance laws. Contributions to the parties remain “heavily regulated,” under strict limits and must be publicly disclosed, he noted. “After this election,” Kappel said, “all of that can be outsourced to unregulated entities that don’t have to disclose their donors.”
Forgot the link for the article above: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39995283/ns/politics-decision_2010
One can only hope that we'll have loads of rich Democrats willing to secretly fund vicious attack ads all across the counbtry next time. Thanks to the radical Roberts Court, a corporation is a person and campaign finance laws are a joke. Democrats better wake up and smell the coffee.
Democrats spent more then Republicans this election cycle. Financing had nothing to do with why Democrats got beat. http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=EADA3CE4-BDA3-4348-00995418331E5A97
well technically all those groups and corporations aren't part of the republican party. I mean, if Acme bricks spends a 100 billion dollars on attack ads on Democrats, it's still the big bad democrats who have more money...
The Great Rejection http://reason.com/archives/2010/11/03/the-great-rejection The election means exactly what you think it means. Michael C. Moynihan | November 3, 2010 Of the many awful features of post-election punditry, perhaps the most irritating is the requirement that every writer find a new, heterodox angle on the previous night’s results. Click around a bit and you’ll doubtless find a depressingly large number of columns making a series of clever, original, and dubious claims—why [insert accepted narrative] is wrong and why the counter narrative I just thought up deserves your attention. But last night’s results are, alas, fairly straightforward. They could be summed up, if one needed to do so in a sentence, as “The Tea Party candidates were a mixed bag and voters were angry about the economy.” So rather than hectoring you about everything you know being wrong—because it’s likely untrue, provided you didn’t get all of your election analysis from Ed Schultz—I offer selected thoughts on last night’s bloodbath, many of which adhere to conventional wisdom. Nice job, South Carolina: Alvin Greene, performance artist, p*rnography aficionado, and shock winner of South Carolina’s Democratic Primary, managed to pull in an astonishing 28 percent of the vote against conservative Republican Jim DeMint. While there are more than enough issues on which one can criticize DeMint, Greene has apparently been living off-planet—with his mother. But despite a series of media appearances that could charitably be called disastrous, Greene still managed to pick up 361,912 votes and carry 10 counties. Christine O’Donnell is awesome at losing elections: Why, a friend once asked me, is Pat Buchanan still allowed on television? The answer might sound conspiratorial, I said, but it always struck me as plausible that MSNBC extended Buchanan’s contract because he represents what that network wanted people to associate with conservatism: A get-off-my-lawn curmudgeon, waving his fist about immigration and, when times demanded it, defending former concentration camp guards. In a television studio last night, preparing to discuss the media’s impact on the election, the host asked me why Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell was, according to a Pew study, the media’s most covered figure during the election cycle. Perhaps O’Donnell—who was so stunningly mediocre, always good for a dumb quote, and set to become the Senate’s most powerful anti-onanist—is another Pat Buchanan. It was an uninteresting race, one that the so-called RINO hunters bequeathed to her opponent, but also one that underscored the idea of the Tea Party as home to fringe characters and goofy former Wiccans. Cap and trade: What more can one add to this Politico lede: “House Democrats who voted for the 2009 bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions—dubbed cap-and-tax by GOP opponents—had a terrible night.” Did they ever. According to Politico “over two dozen lawmakers who favored efforts to clamp down on heat-trapping emissions” were given their walking papers. It’s an important data point to remember when your partisan chums sputter that last night’s elections may have been a bloodbath, but it was one motivated by anti-incumbent sentiment, not anti-Obama anger. Alan Grayson crawls back under his rock: America’s most loathsome politician is unseated. With all the mania about negative campaigning and excessive nastiness, it is good to see that there is a limit to how much embarrassment the people of Florida’s eighth district are willing to endure. Grayson, who appeared on MSNBC an amazing 61 times this year, took negative campaigning to an astonishing low (see the “Taliban Dan Webster” ad) and the voters punished him for it, pulling in a pitiful 38 percent. False consciousness: It was something I heard over-and-over at Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity, from well-meaning attendees who, having previously read Tom Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas, believed that Tea Party types were stumping for causes that “were against their own interests." Marxist intellectuals call this “false consciousness,” and explain that a revolution of the workers is inevitable once those workers understand how badly the managerial class is screwing them. After accusing voters of having a tantrum, Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson hissed at those “voters who lost jobs in the economic collapse and are trying to rework mortgages the bank can’t find the paperwork for, aligned itself with the party that will add $3 trillion to the federal debt over 10 years to keep tax cuts for the wealthy, without specific offsetting spending cuts to speak of.” Expect more of this nonsense in the coming weeks. The Rand Paul victory: Nothing surprising about this, nor was there anything surprising about the hyperventilating reaction of MSNBC host Laurence O’Donnell who, after Paul’s victory speech, warned that civilization would end when Paul was seated in the Senate. Meanwhile, The Root, a black issues magazine owned by The Washington Post, thought Paul’s celebration of divided government and gridlock was a harbinger of the extremism awaiting America: “Rand Paul is at it again, being his normal, insensitive, extremist self. Senator-elect Rand Paul of Kentucky says government gridlock isn't necessarily a bad thing, signaling that cooperation with Democrats isn't high on his agenda…After last night's elections, we can certainly look forward to no change in the future. What do you expect from a man who wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act? And yes, America voted for him anyway.” If by “America” you mean Kentucky and if by "wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act" you mean does not want to repeal the Civil Rights Act, then I suppose The Root is right. The voters of California are the worst people on Earth: Back in 2003, they elected (and then reelected) an Austrian action hero that turned out to be as awful, if not worse, than the governor voters recalled. And now those very progressive, wheat grass-drinking Californians managed to elect Jerry Brown (insert Dead Kennedy’s reference here) and prolong the career of Barbara Boxer, while voting against the legalization of mar1juana. And if that weren’t bad enough, the San Francisco city council yesterday approved a measure to ban Happy Meals, to be replaced by Sad Meals featuring Lori Berenson trading cards and tofu sticks in the shape of Cuba. But remember, their auras smile and never frown. Money doesn’t buy you voter love: Every election it is demonstrated that piles of cash doesn’t assure one a seat in Congress, as it doesn’t assure the Yankees a spot in the World Series. Using a bunch of different metrics, Democrats did a mighty job of outspending Republicans and, nevertheless, to quote President Obama, were delivered a shellacking. So yes, Meg Whitman is the Michael Huffington of 2010. MSNBC completes transformation: Watching MSNBC’s nauseating, petty, smug election coverage was like watching a live stream of a Park Slope dinner party. And it made it official. The network, which has adopted a piecemeal strategy of partisanship—the evening schedule seems to add a liberal firebrand every six months—has now completed its transformation into the left-wing version of Fox News. Prior to the election, one could hear Chris Matthews comparing the brief and isolated outbreak of violence at a Rand Paul event to—you guessed it!—Germany in the 1930s. Not to be outdone, Ed Schultz popped up an hour later declaring that it reminded him too of Nazi violence. A few days later, Matthews would praise Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity, which called for the media to tone down the hyperbole, as “a positive thing.” Last night he was to be found making dick jokes on television as his party was being driven off a cliff. Exit question: How long before Alan Grayson is offered a job as an MSNBC contributor? Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
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And point to something Rick Perry has done that has cultivated that unemployment rate. I agree the economy in Texas is better but that has very little to do with what the government has done. If anything Rick Perry has done a lot of stupid things that most Republicans should be angry about (raising the payroll tax, changing the way the business tax was calculated, etc..)
Oh god I hope not. The last thing we need is a bunch of Ewoks slaughtering an entire legion of our best troops.
more Chamber’s Money Well Spent: 63 Percent of Races Won; 20 Incumbent Democrats Defeated For months, Think Progress has been chronicling the “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce’s $75 million campaign to put its interests over working- and middle-class families. It uses its substantial war chest to protect companies that outsource, oppose health reform, oppose Wall Street reform, and oppose clean energy. The Chamber will not disclose who is financing this campaign, fearing a public backlash. But we know the results: The 112th Congress will have more members to protect its pro-outsourcing, anti-middle class agenda. So far, the Chamber’s spending contributed to the defeat of 20 incumbent Democrats. In all, the Chamber spent $31.8 million on ads or independent expenditures in 62 races. Six of those races are too close to call as of this afternoon. Of the remaining 57, the Chamber’s candidate won 36 of them — or 63 percent. The cost of those 36 wins: nearly $17 million.
