11:25 – Another night, another claim that Obama is going to somehow fundamentally change the American way of life. Mitt Romney said this in his victory speech:

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style social welfare state*. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

*The transcript that politico.com has on their website, which I’m assuming the Romney campaign released, has “entitlement society” in place of where Romney actually said “welfare state.” Romney must have gotten a little carried away in the fervor…

10:45 –  Primary night is essentially over, and it has been since about 8:01 when most of the cable news networks projected Mitt Romney the winner of the New Hampshire primary. No surprise here. With 76% of precincts reporting currently, the results are as follows: Mitt Romney (38.5%), Ron Paul (23.2%), Jon Huntsman (16.7%), and the rest have less than 10%. It’s difficult to imagine that any other candidate is going to be able build enough strength to take on Romney at this point.

7:30 - Less than 30 minutes until the polls close and the votes get tallied up. CNN is unofficially reporting that Mitt Romney so far has taken the lead: (@nhkillion)

CNN: unofficial 2900 votes cast in Ward 1 Manch is Romney romp: Hunt 403, Paul 341, Romney 927 Santorum 162 #fitn

6:15 - It seems like the Obama campaign has decided to weigh in on the New Hampshire Primary by purchasing banner space on two sides of the Union Leader’s website:

We saw the same strategy used last week when they similarly bought ad space on all three sides of the Des Moines Register’s website. The interesting thing here is that the Obama Campaign has decided to stoke the fears of the “Tea Party Agenda” this time.

1:15 – Pot and Kettle

Yesterday, Mitt Romney made an incredibly stupid decision when he decided to frame his views on health care as “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.” This is a highly potent string of words that can be easily used to characterize him as out of touch with everyday Americans, millions of them who have been fired or laid off since the beginning of the recession.

However, as Romney now attempts to plead to voters that his political rivals are taking it out of context (“I was talking about insurance companies. Yeah, we like to be able to get rid of insurance companies that don’t give us the insurance we need.”), he has to deal with fact that he has previously set the bar for what’s contextually acceptable.

If you recall, Romney’s campaign released a blatantly deceptive web ad about a month ago that quoted Obama as saying “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,” when the real, uncut Obama quote was “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’”
When asked about this misleading, the Romney campaign actually boasted of its effectiveness and defended the use of “propaganda”:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

Consequently, it’s laughable to see that Romney is now the one to plead “context!”

12:00 – jay – Happy New Hampshire Primary Day

Or, happy End-of-The-GOP-Primary day.

Latest polls out show downward momentum for Romney and upward momentum for Huntsman. But none of it really matters. The size of the number separating first place (Romney) the rest of the field is too large for any last minute change of fortune. If there is, you will see a lots of “this is what no one expected…polling in New Hampshire has never been terribly accurate.” But I do not think that will happen. Romney will take New Hampshire and effectively end the GOP Primary.

The only question mark is an inconsequential one: Who takes second and third? The race for these positions is largely between Huntsman and Paul, as Santorum’s bounce has begun to fall and wasn’t worth very much in New Hampshire to begin with. A second place finish going to either Huntsman or Paul means nothing in real presidential terms. Both of them remain nationally unelectable. The most consequential result would be a Huntsman second place finish which would legitimize his campaign, and same him from national embarrassment.

Essentially, today has two potential outcomes – the one everyone expects (where the details mean little) or an outrageous change of fortune for Romney at the last minute. If the latter occurs we all go back to the drawing board

9:30 – The first votes were cast shortly after 12am this morning in Dixville Notch, NH and President Obama has taken the lead:

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman tied, with two votes each. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul each got one vote. President Obama received his very first live votes of confidence — three of them.

Accordingly, 1115 has decided to compile a schedule for Season 2 of the 2011/2012 Republican Primary Debates. This is a complete and up-to-date as of January 26, 2012. I’ll leave a link to this post on the sidebar for quick reference.

Today, the Gingrich camp has changed course dramatically on who deserves the blame for this Pearl Harbor-esque defeat. (Hint: it’s not him). Instead of blaming the “system,” Gingrich has now decided to call out a single rogue signature collector:

On a campaign stop at an Algona chocolate store, the former House speaker said the “mistake” occurred because one of their workers committed fraud.

“We hired somebody who turned in false signatures. We turned in 11,100 – we needed 10,000 – 1,500 of them were by one guy who frankly committed fraud.”

So it’s not the “system” at all anymore, just “one guy”? I don’t like the sound of this — did he come from ACORN?

I guess that Newt will probably need to update his Pearl Harbor analogy, since the circumstances that surround his “setback” have changed. Jay and I have decided that the Trojan War is a good analogy:

The year is 1184 BC. The Gingrich campaign has been tricked into accepting a gift from “one guy” in the guise of valid Virginia voter signatures. Instead, Mickey Mouse, Jackie O, Adolph Hitler, and others jump out of the signature roll, leaving Newt 400 signatures short and therefore disqualified from being on the Virginia primary ballot.

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on extending an expiring payroll tax cut tomorrow, delaying a plan to hold a vote on a two-month extension tonight.

“The plan is for us to meet in the morning and do this in the light of day,” Representative David Dreier, the California Republican who heads the House Rules Committee, told reporters as he left a meeting of House Republicans. “There was a great sense of this whole notion of acting in the dark of night.”

Big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania spent big bucks preparing for the standards, and the industry is fuming over the GOP bid to undercut them.

After spending four years and millions of dollars prepping for the new rules, businesses say pulling the plug now could cost them. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association has waged a lobbying campaign for more than a year to persuade the GOP to abandon the effort.

Manufacturers are worried that the rider will undermine companies’ investments and “allow potential bad actors to sell inefficient light bulbs in the United States without any fear of federal enforcement,” said Kyle Pitsor, the trade group’s vice president of government relations.

Yes, you read that correctly: An industry group whose membership includes one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world, General Electric, has had to lobby Republicans in congress to keep government regulations in place. But apparently, their lobbying efforts that represent over 95 percent of the Lighting Industry have now proved to be a failure in the face of a few fringe House Republicans like Michele Bachmann who craftily slipped the language into the bill. The Republicans just couldn’t stomach the narrative that regulations can be beneficial.

Of course, the irony of all of this is that it was President George W. Bush who originally signed the bipartisan-supported bill in 2007 that killed would have killed the Incandescent bulb. At the time, Michele Bachmann responded by introducing the “Light Bulb Freedom Of Choice Act” to the chuckles of President Bush and the rest of the Republican establishment. It seems like she now gets the last laugh.

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to. A group called the Tax Relief Coalition said the problem was finding someone willing to talk about their personal taxes on national radio.

So next we put a query on Facebook. And several business owners who said they would be affected by the “millionaires surtax” responded.

“It’s not in the top 20 things that we think about when we’re making a business hire,” said Ian Yankwitt, who owns Tortoise Investment Management.

What should be amazing is that NPR was able to find actual millionaire ‘job creators’ to speak with on Facebook, not the fact that the GOP’s justification for voting against a tax extension for over 160 American workers hinges on the interests of a non-existent group of small business ‘job creators’ who supposedly wouldn’t be able to hire new employees if the legislation passed.

Well you’ll be glad to hear that Newt Gingrich really does believe that cash-strapped school districts should fire their janitorial staff and hire young children in their place. Speaking to workers at an insurance company in Iowa yesterday, Gingrich earnestly maintained this position:

Gingrich said he received letters after his comments in Massachusetts complaining that janitorial work was hard and dangerous.

“Fine,” he said in Iowa’s capital city during a two-day swing of the state, “So what if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom and you pay them?”

I’m sure that making poor students clean up the shit of their wealthier classmates is the type of radical education reform that our country so desperately needs. This must be his ”City Upon a Hill” brand of American Exceptionalism that so vastly differs from anti-American and liberal child labor laws.

Anyways, it seems like these reforms wouldn’t prevent children from wasting their hard earned cash on pointless electronics. According to that same article on MSNBC.com, Gingrich boasted that his 12 year old granddaughter bought an iPad with money she saved up over an eight month period. The article doesn’t mention whether she worked for it.

“You should never raise taxes in order to cut taxes. Surely congress has the authority and it would be right, if we decide we want to cut taxes to spur the economy, not to have to raise taxes in order to offset those costs. You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what republicans object to. But you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.“

Jon Kyl (11/27/2011):

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” the Arizona Republican argued that continuing a cut in the employee share of the payroll tax would undermine the Social Security system.

[...]

“The problem here is payroll doesn’t go into general revenue, it supports Social Security, and you can’t keep extending the payroll tax holiday and have a secure Social Security,” he said.

This really gets at the heart of present day GOP obstructionism. They will tout some idiotic ideological truism such as “you should never have to offset the cost” of lowering taxes, but then just as fast, they will argue the complete opposite when their own interests have nothing to gain. In the first case, it was the Bush Tax Cuts that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. In the second case, it’s the extension of Obama’s Payroll Tax Cut for the working class.

Besides this hypocritical rhetoric, it should also be noted (1) that the idea that tax cuts don’t have to be offset is straight up bullshit – in fact, almost 2.5 trillion dollars of our national debt was incurred by failing to offset the Bush Tax Cuts; and (2) the second Kyl statement is factually incorrect, since the the payroll tax cut extension is funded by a surtax on people who make more than 1 million dollars per year.

Update: A previous version of this post stated the Bush tax cuts cost 1.5 trillion dollars.

“This country has been maniacally anti-jobs. Obama is a left-wing radical who believes in class warfare and then he’s surprised that everybody who he’s attacking doesn’t create jobs.

Newt Gingrich on Occupy Wall Street demonstrators (11/19/11):

“That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.”

I’ve previously blogged about this subject, but I think it’s worth re-examination because the moral quackery is revolting. On display above are the incompatible viewpoints that are simultaneously held by Newt Gingrich and other conservative politicians when talking about the economy. In the first statement, Gingrich argues that our country’s high unemployment rate is due to “left-wing” economic policies put in place by the Obama Administration. In the second, Gingrich chastises OWS protesters for being unemployed and tells them to “get a job”.

It leads to two conflicting explanations of our economy/OWS:

1. The OWS protesters are unemployed because of Obama’s “anti-jobs” policies, or
2. The economy under Obama has many jobs available but the OWS protesters are just lazy

Which one is it Newt?

The problem, of course, is that when there is a steady 9% unemployment rate and very few jobs to be had, you sound like a complete douche as you pretentiously tell somebody to “get a job.”