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There were two big shocks for me on election night 2012: 1) Obama beat Romney. I had concluded that 2012 would look a lot like 2004, i.e. a 50-49 victory with about 290 Electoral votes. I did not subscribe to the landslide (i.e. Dick Morris) but did see a narrow Romney victory! 2) All of the talk about the "hispano" vote. I had looked at anecdotal evidence and did not see a "hispano" wave on election day. So I was surprised with all of the conventional wisdom that "hispanos" had reelected Obama. It turns out that "hispanos" did not really...

Former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was Jay Leno’s guest on the Tonight Show Friday, and he didn’t have kind things to say about the current White House resident or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. At one point in their discussion, Romney said, “I’m not a fan of the president—in case you didn’t know that.” …

Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican party's presidential nominee in 2012, received large applause as he was introduced on Friday's broadcast of The Tonight Show by host Jay Leno in his first appearance on the late night show since he lost to President Barack Obama in November. Leno asked Romney about the Obama administration's scandal-plagued week and gave him ample time to address the AP, IRS and Benghazi investigations. After making it clear he was done in politics, Romney was given nearly ten minutes to slam Obama's handling of Benghazi and his administration's involvement in other scandals. While discussing the...

A Middle Tennessee company is at the center of a mystery that could turn the political race upside down. The Secret Service wants to know if a group hacked into Price Waterhouse Cooper's computer system in Franklin and got Mitt Romney's tax records. "Right through here and it was just lying on the floor there," Peter Burr recalled.

Let’s face it—on nearly every important issue, from gun control to immigration to gay marriage, red states are holding America back. Lee Siegel on why the South should get the hell out of the union. Let’s not be fooled by all the bipartisan rhetoric that has been streaming out of the GOP since Romney’s self-destruction. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners in a handful of red states still want to secede? Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of...

While gun control legislation is a politically risky vote for red state Democrats, it’s also an issue that could hurt the GOP’s efforts to attract female voters.A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that 65 percent of women favor stronger gun laws, compared to 44 percent of men. That’s consistent with previous polling; a recent Quinnipiac University poll showed 61 percent of women and 45 percent of men in favor stricter gun laws.Richard Feldman, Independent Firearms Association president and former NRA lobbyist, said that the gender gap on gun laws is a long-standing one, and that much of it has...

Did Rob Portman's support of same-sex marriage cost him selection as Mitt Romney's running mate? Mika Brzezinski imagines so. Brzezinski made that suggestion on today's Morning Joe, but Joe Scarborough sarcastically said that the reason Romney didn't pick Portman was that he didn't want to win Ohio. View the video here.

Mitt Romney says it "kills" him that he's not president. But he doesn't blame Superstorm Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or anything else on his loss to President Barack Obama--except his campaign's failure to connect with minority voters. “I lost my election because of my campaign," Romney said on "Fox News Sunday" in his first television interview since his November defeat, "not because of what anyone else did." The former Massachusetts governor refused place blame on Christie, who some Republicans say elevated Obama in his embrace of the president in the wake of the storm. Romney said his inability...

The reckoning has arrived in Detroit. Michigan has an aggressive emergency manager law that allows the government to take over failing cities rather than sending them into bankruptcy. [...] [Mayor Dave] Bing wouldn’t directly reveal what the governor told him, but said the decision is what most have expected. He spoke in terms indicating that an emergency manager is indeed coming to Detroit. Can I nominate someone?

Turns out the New York Times is worried about the future of the Republican Party. So concerned, in fact, it has dedicated more than 6,000 words in this week’s magazine to explore, as the title puts it, “Can The Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?” Indeed, the folks at The Times seem extremely concerned that which they hate might not survive. And by “concerned” I mean they’re hoping. That The Times would seek to harm Republicans, and more specifically conservatives, is about as shocking as Piers Morgan doing a special episode on the need for gun control. But that so...

Hey, remember when President Obama crusaded against Medicare fraud and vowed to crack down aggressively on scammers who've bilked the program out of an estimated $90 billion? Like Archie and Edith Bunker used to sing: Those were the daaaays. While Democrats pretend to protect the elderly and disabled, leaders of the People's Party have pocketed gobs of campaign contributions from fat-cat donors tied to massive Medicare rip-off schemes. Let's talk some more about Dr. Salomon Melgen, shall we? We now know that the jet-setting Florida eye doctor who flew beleaguered Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., to several alleged sex romps in...

Andre Cassagnes, the inventor of the Etch A Sketch that generations of children drew on, shook up and started over, has died in France, the toy's maker said. Cassagnes died Jan. 16 in a Paris suburb at age 86, said the Ohio Art Co., based in Bryan in northwest Ohio. The cause wasn't disclosed Saturday.

The Republicans are doomed. Conservatism is over. President Obama is conducting a mop-up operation at this point. That's the basic consensus in places like New York City, Washington, D.C., and other citadels of blue America. And let's be fair, liberals have every reason to gloat -- a little. The GOP has its troubles. Long-term demographic trends; often-irrational animosity from Hollywood, the media and academia; a thumbless grasp of the culture on the part of many Republicans: All of these things create a headwind for the party and the broader conservative movement. But here's the weird part. That's all true of...

The best thing about math is that it’s a constant. The numbers are what they are. That’s why I’m a data guy, because as a person that believes in absolute truth I have a tendency to like things cut and dried. Leading up to the 2012 election several lies and clever myths were postulated by the ruling class know-it-alls and the charlatans who act on their behalf, and you can bet they will continue peddling their wares this year in light of the results. But the beauty of real numbers is they cut through all the horse puckey right to...

10) Richard Mourdock's Campaign: After defeating Richard Lugar, he should have been able to easily retain the GOP’s Senate seat in a state that Mitt Romney won by 10 points. He PROBABLY would have pulled it off, too -- if, in a display of tone deafness comparable to the Democrats turning Paul Wellstone's memorial into a campaign rally, he hadn't decided to weigh in on abortion and rape after Todd Akin made the issue nuclear."I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life...

The pagan god Janus has two faces, and that's a good thing. He can look to the future and reflect on the past, all at the same time. As ancient gods go, Janus is good at transitions. January, named for Janus, is not only a dreary month to get past as quickly as possible, but it's a time for useful reflection and resolve. Now that we're no longer teetering on the fiscal cliff, President Obama and his administration are busy with anticipation of parades, balls and searches for dance partners at the inauguration of Obama II, and the Republicans can...

Time Magazine has just named President Obama as their Person of the Year. This has been, of course, controversial, and for the usual reasons: much like with the President’s Nobel Peace Prize, one has to wonder what he actually did to deserve it. Surely getting reelected is important, but beside the point; what matters is what you do in office, and I just don’t see much in the way of achievement by the President this year, in which he spent most of it either campaigning or doing nothing to avoid rocking the boat before the election. But Person of the...

Suddenly, 2013 is upon us.  New year, similar issues, familiar players.  But before we set our sights on the battles and controversies to come, let's cast our gaze backwards to the year that was.  2012 promised to be a politically consequential year, and it lived up to its billing, albeit with generally disappointing outcomes from a conservative perspective.  The following is my personal take on the most significant political peaks and valleys from the past calendar year.  Let's begin with the good stuff: (3) Mitt Romney selects Paul Ryan as his running mate. Many conservatives viewed Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy...

With humble apologies to Ernest Lawrence Thayer, who wrote "Casey at the Bat," which was published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1888.The outlook wasn't brilliant for the GOP this year: The economy had tanked; hope and change had morphed to fear. The strong and swift refused to join the presidential race. So the weak and doubtful rose -- and tried to take their place. Our Herman Cain, for instance, flogged his taxing 9-9-9. To 10 parts cuts but 1 part tax, all said that they'd decline. Newt brought his wife, who wore her hair as if it were a...

The year 2012 was a depressing time for people who are already pessimistic about the state of our common culture. Conversely, the re-election of Barack Obama, in large measure made possible by the heavy financial support of Hollywood, projects the optimism of the cultural Left. They anticipate increased blue-state voting patterns in favor of gay "marriage," legalized pot, gun regulations, and what next? Legalized prostitution? Euthanasia subsidized by Obamacare? So let's just line up the cultural winners of Obama's America, where the only impediments to progress are those who believe in religion, manners and "family values." Winner: Seth MacFarlane,...

AFP - No one wanted to be president less than Mitt Romney, his son said in an interview out Sunday that raises new questions about the candidacy of the losing Republican nominee. In an interview with the Boston Globe examining what went wrong with the Romney campaign, his eldest son Tagg explains that his father had been a reluctant candidate from the start. After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg. "He...

Mitt Romney’s son says that his defeated dad never actually wanted the top job and he was reluctantly convinced to run for president. “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to… run,” the eldest Romney son Tagg said in an interview with the Boston Globe. “If he could have found someone else to take his place… he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he...

Mitt Romney didn't want to be president, anyway. That's what Tagg Romney, Mitt's oldest son, told the Boston Globe for its big post-mortem on his father's failed presidential bid published on Sunday. “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life," Tagg Romney told the paper. "He had no desire to ... run. If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside.

Former federal judge and conservative legal scholar Robert Bork died early Wednesday at his Virginia home, his family confirmed to CNN. He was 85. Perhaps best known for his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, Bork was rejected for the post after a contentious confirmation battle led by left-leaning groups that opposed his conservative judicial philosophies. Bork had recently served as a senior legal adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He was a solicitor general during the Nixon administration and first gained notoriety for carrying out the president's order to fire the special prosecutor...

The year 2012 was defined by the calculated re-emergence of Obama worship, no matter how obvious his failures in office. After his re-election, the actor Jamie Foxx let it all hang out in a tribute at the BET Awards on November 25: "First of all, give an honor to God and our lord and savior, Barack Obama!" For that President Jesus gasbaggery, Foxx was selected as one of the winners of the Media Research Center's Best Notable Quotables of 2012, a collection of liberal foolishness selected by 46 judges of distinction in the conservative media. Foxx won the "Barbra Streisand...

Greek mythology, with its tales of Zeus, Apollo and Hera doesn't have a thing on the mythology that liberals have created around themselves. There's Bubba, the President who can feel your pain, BO the leader who has the ability to never be blamed for anything and, of course, the wronged woman Fluke who the gods granted free birth control for the rest of her life for not being allowed to speak to a committee...or something. Still, as you're about to see, the real face of liberalism looks a lot more like Medusa than Aphrodite. 1) Liberals are pro-capitalism: Many liberals...

It's not a lie, Twitchy has the detais here.

SAN DIEGO — The man who planned to be president wakes up each morning now without a plan. Mitt Romney looks out the windows of his beach house here in La Jolla...He devours news from 2,600 miles away in Washington about the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, shaking his head and wondering what if. Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There's no aide to make his peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and emailing his CEO buddies, who've been swooping in and out of La...

As sundry pundits, political consultants, and elected officials search for answers in the wake of the GOP’s decisive election loss, it’s worth noting that while the Republican Party yielded ground in the Senate, House of Representatives, and various state legislatures-to say nothing of its presidential nominee’s defeat-there were several important races where immigration patriots won, or open borders shills were soundly beaten. Overall, it was a much better night for those believe in responsible immigration policies than the reelection of El Presidente might initially suggest. Contrary to the self-serving narrative constructed by professional Hispanics and those eager for an endless...

When Barack Obama was re-elected on November 6, the vast majority of professors across the country cheered and continued to force their liberal ideology on their students. In fact, 96 percent of Ivy League professors who donated to a campaign this election cycle, donated to President Obama. Ivy League educators overwhelmingly supported President Obama with their campaign donations in the presidential election, reinforcing the suspicions of critics who say their bias also shows up in the classroom. Some 96 percent of faculty and staffers at the eight universities who donated wrote their checks to Obama, and at Brown University, just...

The passage in Ruth (1:16) highlights what it means to belong: "Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God my God." This was Ruth's response when her mother-in-law Naomi suggested she go back to her own people after the death of her husband (Naomi's son). But Ruth was determined to stay, to be with Naomi. In a broader context of groups and leaders, Ericka Anderson, author of the new book "Leading So People Will Follow," describes great business leaders we are drawn to follow. "We are drawn...

Filling in on Rush Limbaugh’s Monday radio show, National Review columnist Mark Steyn said that Republicans lost big on Election Day because less engaged and more uniformed voters turned out in force. “We do very well in off years, in the midterms — 1994, 2002,” Steyn said. “Republicans can have good years then because essentially they’re low-turnout elections — people who are engaged in politics vote. In the presidential years, people voted — a broader pool of voters comes in, and they’re basically people who swim in the broader culture. They’re not people who know the name of their congressmen...

In the aftermath of the re-election of President Barack Obama, conservatives searched the heavens and the earth for answers. Some suggested that Mitt Romney lost because Republicans didn't reach out more to Latino voters; some suggested that Romney lost because his "get out the vote" system fell apart on Election Day. Romney himself said that he lost because President Obama separated voting groups with particularly calibrated "gifts" designed to curry their favor. In truth, Mitt Romney lost for the same reason that traditional marriage lost on Election Day: America is becoming a less religious country. And that bodes ill for...

Every person who talks and writes about politics gets stuff wrong. I’ve gotten my fair share wrong. But what I think I got most wrong in Campaign 2012 was the damage Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark would do to him. It may seem obvious, but bear with me. Mitt Romney was talking off the cuff to a supposedly off the record group of donors and muddled several data points together, ultimately telling the tale of the 47% who won’t vote for him for any reason. He was referencing the 47% who don’t pay taxes and interwove it with a 47% of...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

Our large cruise ship sailed within view of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a gathering of conservatives sponsored by National Review magazine considered the wreckage of the 2012 election. Most of the writers and commentators on board agreed with Ralph Reed of the Faith and Freedom Coalition that the last thing conservatives need to do now is to form a "circular firing squad." But lessons must be learned. Was Mitt Romney, as some suggested, "our best foot forward" -- a highly intelligent, photogenic, generous, public-spirited, articulate man of great integrity whose loss can only be chalked up to the poor judgment...

For a second there, it sounded like David Gregory was onto something. But just as fast, he reverted to liberal form . . . On today's Morning Joe, the Meet The Press host first argued that Republicans don't have to become more moderate—they just need to change their "tone." But within seconds, Stretch was singing Mitt Romney's praises for having favored, prior to the primaries, "massive [read: liberal] immigration reform." Gregory then bemoaned the fact that during the primaries, Romney "had to keep moving to the right." View the video here.

In a New York magazine piece this week, Benjamin Wallace-Wells eulogizes Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. The headline pretty much sums it up: “So long, Mitt: In love with America, terrified for its future, relegated to its past.” But in the final paragraph, Wallace-Wells made a good observation about Romney’s lasting legacy as the GOP nominee. “[J]ust a week after Romney seemed poised to become president,” he writes, “there is no segment of the Republican Party that could be called Romneyist.” That’s part of the reason why he lost. Many times during the campaign, I slammed Romney for his ideological promiscuity....

This will be short and just coming off the top of my head without research post. I am an old man and have in my various business ventures during my life had to deal with every ethnic, religious, agnostic, atheist, etc. group that I can think of. There were none of these groups that gave me more hope in the morality, cohesiveness, respect for others, - on and on than the Mormons (as a whole). After learning about the devotion of the Islamic faith, I could only in retrospect, think that only the Mormons held at least as much true...

We mighta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, still-some-day-may elect a president serious about the matter of the nation's freedoms. Or, possibly, not. The second possibility -- so an ancient mariner reflects -- arises from a sea change in our culture. It could be that more than half of us - a fast-rising proportion -- don't understand "serious" the way it was understood until half a century ago. The loose, lax, louche United States of 2012 seems dissimilar in important respects to the country that chose Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. A week after the Nov. 6 debacle, the post-mortems go on: the...

I’m not much of a whiner, nor am I someone who makes predictions. I’d hoped for a Romney victory, though more for an Obama defeat. But that, when you think about it, was the problem. While there’s no doubt Romney would’ve been a much better President than the current occupant of that office, when people are presented with a choice between the vague they know and a vague they don’t know, they will pick what they know. Romney offered a vision of American that was different, but didn’t spend a lot of time explaining how it would get to different...

Syndicated radio host and Ohio native Bill Cunningham expresses his disappointment in Tuesday's victory for Obama on tonight's broadcast of FOX News' "Hannity." "I felt as if something crawled inside my body and died. Tuesday night, I was lower than whale dung in the Mariana trench. Man, I talked with you. I was done. But today and last night, I said, 'You know what? We're not wrong. We didn't do it. The messenger wasn't the best, the message wasn't the best.' And I think that there were millions of moderates in Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, who kind of sat this one...

Kenyan mother names twins Barack Obama and Mitt Romney - Millicent Owuor, 20, shows off her newborn twins named after U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and GOP challenger A young Kenyan mother has named her newborn twin sons after the U.S. president-elect and his defeated Republican challenger. Millicent Owuor, 20, gave birth to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on Wednesday at the Siaya District Hospital in southwest Kenya, according to the Standard. Owuor told the Kenyan news outlet her sons' names will always remind her of the election in the United States. The hospital is near the village of Kogelo,...

Mitt Romney had planned to celebrate his election as the nation’s 45th president with an eight-minute fireworks display over Boston Harbor. The same company that does some of the illuminations for Boston’s Fourth of July celebration was poised to ignite fireworks within view of Romney’s party at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to celebrate a win over President Obama. A permit filed with the City of Boston said the detonation could occur any time between 7 p.m. Tuesday, just after the first polls closed, and 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, which ended up being just before Romney conceded the race.

We spent billions of dollars and billions of words on an election to switch from President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House to President Obama, a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. Every election predictor was wrong, except one: Incumbents usually win. Republicans have taken out a sitting president only once in the last century, and that was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. Sadly, Reagan's record remains secure. The Democrats ran up against the incumbency problem in 2004. The landslide election for Democrats in 2006 suggests that Americans were not thrilled with Republicans around the...

The very same people that have shoved Mitt McDoles down our throats for decades now will re-emerge from the ruling class to tell us that [Romney] was too conservative (I know, I laughed out loud, too)... Romney did everything the cynical Karl Rove wing of the party says Republicans have to do to win...And he still lost. Perhaps if Romney had gone after the president...on Benghazi the way he went after Gingrich and Santorum...he wouldn’t have lost. [Obama] embraced his base, even on social issues....The progressives cast a vision that took more than one election cycle, followed it through, and...

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos talks what President Obama's re-election means for the country on "World News" with Diane Sawyer. DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: So give me your bottom line on the Republicans now. We talked about the soul-searching, what do they do next? GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Soul-searching, perhaps a civil war. You've got to look at this party right now. They have won the popular vote only once since 1988, in the presidential race. And it was probably best summed up by Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union (ACU). He said the party is too old, too white...

To my Conservative Friends: I sat in front of my computer last night and started this post.  I clicked on "New Post", started, stopped and started again...  I froze after just 3 words and stared into a blank wall saying to myself, "What could I possibly write?"  What do I say to everyone who, like me, had such great hopes for this election.  What do I say to the people who felt, like me, that we needed Mitt Romney to win because we sincerely felt our country, our businesses, our families so desperately needed him to win. I realized that...

The 2012 Presidential election was a rerun of 1988. Michael Dukakis was slow and superficial at presenting himself to the voters. It was already too late by the time Dukakis got around to trying to tell the voters who he is and what he stood for. This time, it was the Democrats who defined Mitt Romney and controlled the national debate before Mitt Romney’s campaign could get its message across. Democrats learned the lesson of 1988. Republicans forgot it. Democrats acted early, aggressively, early, relentlessly, early, forcefully, and early to define Mitt Romney in the voters mind. In fact, the...

In this election the Republican Party ran two wholly inoffensive blue state Republicans on a platform of jobs at a time when the economy was everyone’s chief concern and the incumbent had absolutely failed to fix the economy. And they lost. The Monday — or Wednesday — morning quarterbacks will have a fine time debating what Mitt Romney should have done differently. The red Republicans will say that he should have been more aggressive and should have hit Obama on Benghazi. The blue Republicans will blame a lack of outreach to Latinos. Some will blame Sandy, others will blame Christie...