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The Washington Free Beacon strikes again: MSNBC's Fun Election Night Coverage | SUPERcuts! #123

Nice maps and colors at the site. http://uselectionatlas.org/2014.php

It is often claimed that conservative religious voters, especially white evangelicals, are going the way of the dinosaur, consigned to demographic irrelevance. But they were a key component of the Republicans’ 2014 midterm victories. According to exit polls, Conservative religious voters made up as big a percentage of the electorate as ever, and they backed Republicans at least as strongly as ever. White evangelicals were 26% of the electorate this year, and 78% of them voted Republican. That’s up from 2010, when they were 25 percent of the electorate, and 77 percent voted Republican, and 2006, when they were 24...

WASHINGTON — As most Republicans were taking a victory lap the morning after the elections, a group of conservatives huddled anxiously in a conference room not far from Capitol Hill and agreed that now is the time for confrontation, not compromise and conciliation. Despite Republicans’ ascension to Senate control and an expanded House majority, many conservatives from the party’s activist wing fear that congressional leaders are already being too timid with President Obama. They do not want to hear that government shutdowns are off the table or that repealing the Affordable Care Act is impossible — two things Republican leaders...

It sure seems that way to Politico after the midterm elections. The writing has been on the wall since the Democratic Party nominated and elected a President who declared that his energy policies would “bankrupt” coal operators in a 2008 interview, but the cycle didn’t complete itself until after Barack Obama’s EPA began to pursue those policies in earnest. What used to be the heart of Democratic working-class union strength has now flipped entirely red, and probably permanently: The Republicans’ romp this week may have permanently turned coal country from blue to red.Coal-heavy districts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois...

The IRS-Benghazi Congress In many ways, the results from this week’s elections confirm what you already know as a supporter of Judicial Watch. Voters are sick and tired of the Obama administration’s lawlessness. The new Congress has new mandate to clean up Washington and put the Obama administration (and, frankly, itself) back under the rule of law. And all the talk of policies and campaign ads is for naught if elections can be stolen. Assuming the leftists in the Obama administration cared about what voters think, they would see their war on voter ID has little support. Contrary to what...

Barack Obama is a gifted politician. But a president is judged by the gifts he leaves behind. Following his fourth national election as party leader, Democrats are taking stock of what they have received. For Obama, there have been two convincing presidential victories; for the Democratic Party, electoral ruin at every other level. On Tuesday, the largest Democratic Senate losses since 1980. The ranks of moderate Democrats — including Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Kay Hagan and (probably) Mary Landrieu — decimated. During Obama’s presidency, the loss of nearly 70 House seats, producing the largest Republican majority since 1931. The near-extinction...

President Obama opened a White House meeting with congressional leaders by calling for an end Washington’s gridlock, arguing that was the message behind Tuesday’s Democratic drubbing. Speaking from the White House dining room, where he was flanked by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on one side and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on the other, Obama said the midterm result demonstrated that voters were “frustrated by the gridlock in Washington.” “They’d like to see more cooperation,” the president said. “And I think all of us have the responsibility, me in particular, to try to make that happen. And so, this...

From the Washington Examiner President Obama did something extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, in his post-election news conference Wednesday: He claimed a mandate on behalf of voters who didn't vote. "To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you," the president said. "To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too."...Obama's message to Republicans was unmistakable: My mandate is bigger than your mandate.... LOL. Liberalism is the ideology of anti-intellectual children, the examples of this are too numerous to count, but Obama has the brightest (or more accurately,...

Obama met with Republican leaders today at the White House for a “bipartisan lunch.” This was his first meeting with Republican leaders after Democrats were shellacked in the midterm elections. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HxyrML3WkwwObama lashed out at Republicans when the cameras were turned off. The AP reported: Republicans attending the postelection lunch at Obama’s invitation said they asked him for more time to work on legislation, but the president said his patience was running out. He reiterated his intent to act on his own by the end of the year if they don’t approve legislation to ease deportations before then and send it...

We know Barack Obama is good at least one thing -- getting Barack Obama elected president of the United States. How good he is at being president of the United States is a subject of considerable debate. A less debatable proposition: He is just plain awful at running a political party. People often forget that among the many formal roles the president has -- commander in chief, first diplomat, etc. -- he is also the leader of his own party. And in that role, he stinks. It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 2008, Obama was supposed to herald...

The “most expensive election in history.” Our democracy is being “bought and sold.” This election, “debased by money, shames us all.” These are some of the recent expressions of outrage about what the Center for Responsive Politicsestimates to have been $3.67 billion spent for federal offices during the 2014 midterms. Two days before the election on “Face the Nation,” CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked viewers to name one item whose costs have gone up as much over time as campaigns. That’s easy. While campaign spending soared to $3.67 billion this year from $1.6 billion in 1998, federal government spending rose 5%...

Some observations on the election: 1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years. 2) In seriously contested races, GOP candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. 3) The combination of Obama’s low job approval and Harry Reid’s virtual shutdown of the Senate insured a Republican Senate majority. 4) Democratic territory has been reduced to the bastions of two core groups — black voters and gentry liberals. 5) In many states — including many carried twice by Obama — Republicans have been governing successfully, at...

Republicans, who have already blocked a Democratic super-majority in the California Senate, have also succeeded in defeating a Democratic super-majority in the Assembly.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blasted President Barack Obama Tuesday night in the wake of a devastating Democratic defeat in the midterm elections. "It doesn´t make sense that we have to fight so hard against our own government and our own administration and our President to try to find a balance," said Manchin on MSNBC. Manchin said West Virginians have "the perception of the government attacking them, which basically is what´s happening." Manchin added, "The people are speaking loud and clear. They don´t like what they´re seeing. I don´t like what I´ve been involved with the last four years and I´ve

(Newser) – Ted Cruz wasn't on the ballot, but he still seemed pretty giddy with victory last night after his party won control of the Senate. The senator declared that the "era of Obama lawlessness is over" and urged his fellow Republicans to "do everything humanly possible to repeal ObamaCare," the Hill reports. He called the result a "powerful repudiation of the Obama agenda" and urged Republicans "to come together in unity to stand as one"—but declined to say whether he would support Mitch McConnell's bid to become Senate majority leader. "That will be a decision for the conference...

Krauthammer: [Obama] played as the puzzled observer. He was asked about the meaning of the election, and he said “I’ll leave to others the reading of tea leaves.” Was this really a subtle result? Was this sort of complicated and nuanced? This was the worst wall-to-wall, national, unmistakable, unequivocal shellacking that you will ever see in a midterm election, and it happened on just about every level. You’ve got in the House the Republicans now have the largest majority since 1929.

Less than two months after their most joyous moment together, the relationship between the Obama White House and Senate Democrats went off track and has never recovered. Instead of basking in the victory glow of President Obama’s impressive 2012 reelection and an improbable two-seat gain for Democrats, they found themselves at the edge of the now infamous “fiscal cliff.” But Reid’s operation, along with his close ally, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, did not trust Obama’s negotiating skills. At that point, McConnell called Biden and famously asked: “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” Reid, Schumer and other...

Former Obama White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, now a political commentator for CNN, casually admitted that, yes, his party uses race to convince minorities that Republicans seek to oppress them. Before the midterm election, Carney said: "Republicans are going to pick up seats in the Senate and the House, and they may win control of the Senate. So (Democrats) need to mobilize their base voters, and that is especially true of minority voters." Carney also admitted that the use of the race card is cynical: "Equating support for stand-your-ground law ... doesn't mean you supported the action that took...

If I were advising the White House right now, I would encourage President Obama to take advantage of the end of this year's election cycle—the next fifty or so days—to immediately try to change the subject, in a big way. The Obama administration should act right away to use its executive powers to take steps to deal with long-ignored issues that need to be dealt with for the good of the nation. This cannot be done quietly. To change the media narrative, issues acted upon will have to be controversial enough to dominate the news. President Obama should embrace good...