Politics

Voters stayed home.

"About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 — 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry."

That's because the candidates are so terrible. This is why Romney lost. Don't give me any crap about demographics or moochers. This shows the American people are sick and tired of the travesty the two parties foist on us every day.

"That is staggering. And, as if to ensure that conservatives continue making the same mistakes that have given us four more years of ruinous debt, economic stagnation, unsustainable dependency, Islamist empowerment, and a crippling transfer of sovereignty to global tribunals, Tuesday’s post-mortems fixate on the unremarkable fact that reliable Democratic constituencies broke overwhelmingly for Democrats. Again, to focus on the vote is to miss the far more consequential non-vote. The millions who stayed home relative to the 2008 vote equal the population of Ohio — the decisive state. If just a sliver of them had come out for Romney, do you suppose the media would be fretting about the Democrats’ growing disconnect with white people?"
"The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way."
"Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off — and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming."

This guy gets it.

"What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party’s nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on — cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium. In the void, the party establishment proceeds to delegate its response to John McCain and Lindsey Graham: the self-styled foreign-policy gurus who urged Obama to entangle us with Benghazi’s jihadists in the first place, and who are now pushing for a repeat performance in Syria — a new adventure in Islamist empowerment at a time when most Americans have decided Iraq was a catastrophe and Afghanistan is a death trap where our straitjacketed troops are regularly shot by the ingrates they’ve been sent to help. "

It's nice to see this prominently displayed in national review.

"Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along. (See Jonah Goldberg’s jaw-dropping tally from early 2004 — long before we knew their final debt tab would come to nearly $5 trillion.) No matter what they say in campaigns, today’s Republicans are champions of massive, centralized government. They just think it needs to be run smarter — as if the problem were not human nature and the nature of government, but just that we haven’t quite gotten the org-chart right yet."

Yep.

Voter turnout has been plummeting in western countries for decades.

Petition calling for the secession of Texas garnered 27,000 signatures since November, 9. Obama has promised to answer any petition that garners 25,000 signatures in 30 days, so we all look forward to Obama's worthless response. Naturally the article doesn't provide a link to the petition. Fifteen other states have petitioned to secede. Here's the link. Right now it has 34,386 signatures. Unfortunately you have to sign up to sign anything. In addition, people are asking the federal government for permission to secede, which will never be granted. However it does create media buzz and put big federal government on the defensive.

Outrageous advantages in vote counts for Obama in Philadelphia attributed to discipline. Report claims 59 districts in Philly recorded zero total votes for Romney. Normally I'd be skeptical of a report like this, but this reporter goes on to explain why there's nothing corrupt about this. But he tries to be balanced...

"Still, was there not one contrarian voter in those 59 divisions, where unofficial vote tallies have President Obama outscoring Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0?
The unanimous support for Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods - clustered in almost exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia - fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence."

Yes it does because it's not credible. Here's a point of comparison:

"In the entire 28th Ward, Romney received only 34 votes to Obama's 5,920."

But that's believable, if barely. It's not zero votes for Romney. That is unbelievable.

"Nationally, 93 percent of African Americans voted for Obama, according to exit polls, so it's not surprising that in some parts of Philadelphia, the president did even better than that."

Agreed. But zero votes in 59 division is unbelievable.

"In 2008, McCain got zero votes in 57 Philadelphia voting divisions. That was a big increase from 2004, when George W. Bush was blanked in just five divisions."

And this never prompted anybody to investigate corruption? Rhetorical question.

The connection between Trotsky, Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives.

No matter the political system, a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat. The result is the same.