Harry Potter fans will remember from the first book in the series where Vernon Dursley asks why Sunday is his favorite day of the week, and Harry Potter correctly answers “no post on Sundays,” in reference to the fact that all of the other days brought unwanted letters from Hogwarts.
This morning I went to my email inbox this morning to check the day’s birther news alerts from Google and there weren’t any. This may well be the first time in a year that there hasn’t been even a hint of a birther. Despite the fiction promoted by birthers that the mainstream media ignored the issue, the fact is that birthers were a daily subject for newspapers and news web sites and have been for years. Birthers aren’t taken seriously by newspapers, and rightly so, but they are not ignored—or at least they weren’t.
Now that the election is over there is no chance for the birthers to have any real influence on anything, and so they are no longer news. At least that’s what my confirmation bias leads me to conclude from one data point this morning.
Birthers are taking a bit of a break now, it seems. Shocked from Obama’s re-election, a lot of what I’m seeing out there is 2 new things:
1) Calls for secession. Orly is really hopping on this one.
2) Claims that it was electoral fraud that enabled the re-election.
These could make for some interesting articles on your site.
Personally, I think after the electoral votes are formally cast and Congress counts the votes and the election is finally officially certified via the two barks of the Electoral Collie, they’ll go back to the old fashioned stuff they were trying from 2008-2011, before ballot challenges.
FIFY
Birtherism seems essentially dead on Politicalforum. Which kind of shocks me.
Mostly now it is pure racist attacks on Obama or calls for subverting the election through secession, impeachment or revolution(thank you Trump).
Has Birtherism truly died?
Like a bad fungal infection, I think it has only gone slightly dormant after strong doses of reality were injected by the election.
It will re-emerge when the nations needs it.
freeperville birfoonery quieting down, as far as this sampling of tags and their last use shows:
birthcertificate: 11/08 5:46pm
certifigate: 11/07 6:33pm
naturalborncitizen: 11/07 6:33pm
eligibility: 11/07 12:28am
birthers: 11/06 11:02pm
naturalborn: 09/07 3:32pm
orlytaitz: 06/06 3:29pm
drorly: purged
orly: purged
taitz: purged
Another right-wing claim is that Obama didn’t carry any states which have Voter ID laws in effect, but as usual they are wrong. Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington have Voter ID laws in place.
Also, Pennsylvania has a sort-of Voter ID.
“Voter ID, so Governor Romney can win Pennsylvania – done.” – State Rep. Mike Turzai (His district is East Bumf*ck)
Yeah, right.
WND certainly gave it their best try, in an article where they discounted the Obama wins in Washington, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire and Michigan by saying that none of them had photo ID requirements.
(New Hampshire has photo ID, but you could cast a “challenged” ballot, allowing you to provide proof within the following month.)
So all four of their “true voter ID” states, by their definition did indeed go red — as they did for at least the last three elections, so that was a real surprise.
Oh wait, that’s not quite right: Indiana went for Obama in 2008!
Funny thing though: JPotter points out that in 2008, Indiana already had photo voter ID in place. And in ’08 they went blue for the first time since 1964.
Thanks, LW, I forgot about New Hampshire.
In New York, the only requirement is that your signature has to match the signature on your voter registration record. In my lifetime there have never been any serious allegations of voter fraud in New York.
Here’s the best story of the night. Sleep well, Mario:
In 59 Philadelphia voting divisions, Mitt Romney got zero votes
It’s one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia, but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/178742021.html
My question is: how many voters are there in each of those divisions? As the article points out, there are 1687 such divisions in Philadelphia. It’s not like Romney got exactly zero votes in the entire city; he got zero votes in 3.5% of the city. Which seems logical to me, given how strong big cities favor Democrats.
Although there really isn’t that much surprising in those stats either. All it shows is just slightly worse performance in those areas for Romney than for McCain in 2008 and an increasing trend against the GOP in those areas, since the GWB years… but nothing unprecedented at all.
In fact, NBC already covered this very topic:
http://nativeborncitizen.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/educating-the-confused-voter-fraud-pa/
Speaking of Pennsylvania, here are some numbers I threw together last night. Can you say gerrymandering?
Votes for President Obama – 2,907,448
Votes for Governor Romney – 2,619,583
Votes for Democratic Congressional candidates – 2,722,560
Votes for Republican Congressional candidates – 2,651,901
(assuming my math is correct)
Number of House seats won by Democrats – 5
Number of House seats won by Republicans – 13
The closest House race was 4 points, but the second closest was a 14 point victory.
The five Democrats who won received 61, 69, 77, 85 and 89 per cent of the vote in their elections.
Indeed!
“Gerrymandering”. Why, yes, yes, I can.
Re-districting has to be done after every census. Seems a no-brainer that the protection of democracy necessitates keeping the process non-partisan. but it never has been. In the age of GIS, gerrymandering has been taken to amazing extremes of surgical precision. In Texas, it’s a bloodsport and a farce.
I’m happy to say that in Okieland, congressional districts remain sensible … but there’s only 5 of them. Not enough to have fun with. 1 for each city, and 3 large rural zones. However, Tulsa or OKC were to go blue, I’d expect a spiderweb to result, slicing up the city in question to dilute ir’s electorate with rural voters!
The way they gerrymandered my beloved OH after the 2010 census is just…horrible.
When Mo Udall retired, Arizona gerrymandered his old district to try to take it for the GOP.
They split Tucson in half, the east side supposedly having a GOP advantage. The west side basically contained the black and latino and indian population that was pretty solidly Democrat, but the north west has the ‘country club set’ GOP base giving the seat a much more ‘balanced’ look.
But they didn’t stop there. They connected the west side of Tucson with the SouthWest side of Phoenix. The theory being that there wasn’t enough name recognition between the two latino communities to allow a serious coherent challenger to consolidate the vote.
Tucson and Phoenix are 120 miles apart, and they joined the two blocks with a corridor ONE YARD WIDE and a hundred miles long.
That has got to be one of the most obvious bullfeces gerrymander I have ever seen. The voters saw through the tactic, and instead of the GOP winning both seats, they lost both. Several rounds of redistricting later that gerrymander no longer exists, but the two Tucson based seats remain mostly Democratic. Raul Grijalva holds the west side and I think Ron Barber has won Gabby Giffords’ old seat (but its still neck and neck).