— A little after Mitt Romney gave his concession speech late Tuesday night, and after he and Ann were safely tucked into bed, the Secret Service said goodnight to the former presidential candidate with these six words. (via newsweek)
(via newsweek)
Start f*cking drinking now, folks.
Voting and civil rights activists said Tuesday that Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law was causing mass confusion across the state as people tried to go to the polls.
Because of a judge’s ruling in October, the law attempted to walk a line by allowing poll workers to ask voters for photo identification while also giving voters a big loophole to cast a regular ballot without it.
The Election Protection coalition’s voter hotline here began lighting up with complaints soon after polls opened. Some voters said they were upset about being asked for photo identification. Others said they had been turned away because they did not provide it.
“We’ve definitely gotten reports about voters being turned away,” Eric Marshall, co-director of the Election Protection coalition, told TPM. “We’ve had reports of people who have shown up, been asked, and when they didn’t show ID they were turned away.”
Politico with some Election Day realkeeping. As media reporter Dylan Byers put it: “Ladies & gentlemen, we’re more than a decade into the 21st century and this is the most-watched cable news network.”
Sometimes, Dylan Byers is all right. This is one of those times.
We’re tracking this right now on our voting-problems map.
— Greatest Politico Story Ever Asks Why Spokespeople Are Always So Mean to Politico | Vanity Fair (via markcoatney)
(via markcoatney)
A Pennsylvania man employed by a company working for the Virginia GOP was arrested for destroying voter registration forms.
Chris Hayes on how Romney broke the rules of the debate, and why it matters:
I thought the moment of the oil drilling, that debate to me was a key moment. The reason was this. Mitt Romney asked the president a direct question numerous times, kept interrupting him, “Isn’t it true? Isn’t it true? Didn’t it go down?” Now the rules for the debate, that we all got leaked, number five, subsection E: “The candidates may not ask each other direct questions during any of the four debates.”
Now, at a certain level, who cares, right? Who cares? Here’s why I care. The theme of the last ten years of this country is the people at the top have felt the rules don’t apply to them. And you send your people to sit down and negotiate a set of rules, and 20 minutes into it you throw it out the window. And everything we’ve seen, from the financial crisis to everything else that’s happened in this country, has been about the oligarchs and the ruling class and the people at the top feeling that they are not a party to the social contract. So some stupid little contract that was negotiated by your people, you don’t worry about.
(Source: upwithsteve)
The presidential candidates sparred over financial reform in Wednesday night’s debate, with Mitt Romney attempting to tack to the center, proclaiming his support for Wall Street regulations. Republicans, however, have fought tooth-and-nail to neuter or eliminate the key agencies charged with writing and enforcing those regulations, among them the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Romney has derided as “the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of our nation.”
This week, however, brought fresh evidence of the need not only for strong regulations but strong regulators, like the CFPB, as well, to enforce those rules and police Wall Street’s financial institutions. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed suit this week against JPMorgan Chase for ”multiple fraudulent and deceptive acts” at Bear Stearns, which is now owned by JPMorgan, in the run-up to the financial crisis. In fact, the fraudaulent behavior was so bad, according to the civil complaint filed Monday, that Wall Street traders were circulating rumors of a full-blown meltdown at Bear Stearns more than a year before the firm nearly collapsed, triggering the financial crisis:
By the end of 2006, [Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities] traders at other banks were beginning to hear “rumors of a credit meltdown at [Bear Stearns]” … According to the trader who had heard the rumor, the “precise description” of Bear Stearns’ state at that time was “def co[n] 3” - or “defensive condition 3” - the military term signifying a heightened state of alert. The trader sharing the “rumors” then pointedly remarked: ”little due diligence upfront makes for a bad day 12 months later.”
Wall Street regulators were apparently so ineffectual that a full year of rumors about a “meltdown” at one of the world’s largest financial institutions escaped their attention. Now, Republicans are working relentlessly to gut the very institutions charged with preventing a similar meltdown from happening again.
(Source: upwithsteve)
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Roxane Gay talks about Wednesday’s presidential debate in “A Matter of Dignity.” (via therumpus)
The problem I have with this quote is the nostalgia embedded in it. There was never a halcyon day where “ideas or substance” mattered in a U.S. election campaign, especially for marginalized people. Case in point, here.
(via therumpus)
