RimKitty: well said! That's why, contra Pea's pessimism, the future belongs to the liberals. The Right will suffocate inside their closed epistemic loop, no matter how well funded it is.

I ask all my Republican family and friends to join me in healing our nation.

The only way I see that this can be done is if the Republican Party looks at itself and look at what it was before with Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. It was the Grand Old Party. It was a party of principle, of integrity and a true desire to help the country. The Republicans need to decide if they are a religious organization with a quest for political power or a political party with a quest of co-governance of our country.

It is impossible for a political party who places a deity above the fair and equitable needs of the citizens of a nation. They must reconcile that a woman has civil liberties and privacy to her own body and is capable of making the choices she must make. Those of faith can continue to practice their faith as they wish, which actually means that they as an individual shall make the choice to not use contraception or terminate a pregnancy for any reason, but they also accept that such a position is private and not to be public law.

Additionally, the Republican party must end their hatred of those who love someone of the same gender. They must accept that our national ideal is fairness and equality for everyone. It is a legal issue as it pertains to public law and has nothing to do with religious dogma. Again, if they personally find it objectionable, then they have the choice to lot fall in love with someone of their same gender. That is their option. But it should not be enshrined into public law.

They must give up the idea that America is a country specifically created by a God. It is a nation created by noble and educated people who studied history and knew there had to be a better way to govern than what had been happening for the past thousands of years. In great debate and negotiation, they formed the framework to self governance. It was not perfect, but it was a grand idea that they hoped future generations would refine to maybe achieve the quest for utopia. Once the Republicans understand this, then maybe they can start to act with the same great compromise of our founders and work to refine our republic as a democracy of the self governed that has achieved the goal of fairness and equality.

We may argue about the size of government. But lets both pledge that what we both want is a government that meets the needs of the people and one we can afford. If that is the pledge, instead of Grover Norquists pledge, then we can move this country forward. As long as your goal is to return to a confederacy of loose connected states and a very small and week central government, movement forward will always be obstructed.

It is time for Republicans to stop demonizing those who do not agree with them. It is time to respect the opposition and start to work with them to find common goals to help the people of the nation.

Yes, the Democrats are not perfect and have a lot to look at introspectively as well. But the Republicans must admit to themselves and to the nation that it is they who has stalled and blocked meaningful progress to help the nation recover from the failed policies of G.W. Bush and seek compromise with Democrats to achieve the goal all citizens desire; to recover and move forward as a nation.

If that is not forthcoming in the next four years and if they continue their quest to establish a single party power structure for the oligarchy, nothing will change and we will limp along angry and hostile to everyone.

The teapubratz are going to be plotting their next moves, for 2014 I imagine, as soon as they get Karl pumped with sedatives. I love it. All those lies and all those millions and they LOST!

The repubs are like the American tourist in a foreign country that doesn't know the local language. They figure they can make themselves understood if they just speak slowly and talk louder. It sounds like their reaction will be to double down on their shift to the looney right side of the political spectrum, and hence, continue sinking ever more quickly into political irrelevance. It is as if the captain of the Titanic said, "I know we can stop sinking by pumping more water into the ship!".

The inconvenient truth for the GOTP is that they have handcuffed themselves to the Tea Party and evangelicals, and purged anyone that went against their orthodoxy. Hence, there are no moderates left to take back the party, and the echo chamber repeats the same discredited mantra that costs them election after election, bellowing all the louder to drown out the reality that a platform built around appealing to old white men is electoral folly today, and political suicide in the future.

It's time for moderate repubs, (yes, there are still plenty out there like Dick Lugar), to give serious thought to a new party that reflects their views of moderate fiscal and social conservatism. In the era of Citizens United, I would not be surprised to see such a party garner a lot of financial support from businesses and people who gave heavily to repubs this year, because they felt it was the only game in town, (wrongly, in my opinion).

Thomas Friedman had a good piece on this in the Times this morning:

http://goo.gl/GYeB8

What about what President Obama said yesterday in his victory speech? "In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward."

Will Romney accept?

a

Work to do? It's not about the demographics - it's about truth, integrity and repackaging bald-faced lies and pretending they're truths. They should start with David Eisenhower's editorial back in 2008 and work down to the bottom of the cesspool from there.

It sure doesn't sound like the repugs are gonna play ball.

I thought I might hear the sound of shredding Grover Norquist's pledge, but no… THEY will not let go of their need to control the people, they want to dictate to the President how far he must reach. Not those spending cuts, THESE spending cuts.

We Made This.

1) I built this company with my bare hands. 2) Or is it, Without me, my bosses company would not exist. So which is ?? Or is there a third possibility, and we are both a bit wrong. As a kid, I remember not the best paying jobs but the most fun, well enjoyable. I lived pay check to paycheck. I laughed at unions. Then I became a parent and bought a real house and got a good paying union job. I am 35 years old and hate the silly union. One day as I am walking to my car while leaving work, I gazed across the street to the old place I so loved to work at. I stared at all the rusty old cars in their parking lot and began to dream of the good old days. I then, jumped in my brand new Oldsmobile and cell phoned my stay-at-home-wife-and-mother-of-my-children to ask if I should grab some pizzas for tonight. That was my 1990s.

On November 7, 2012, the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times states:

The longer-term problem for the president will be coping with the dueling pressures of an economy that's growing too slowly and a federal debt that's growing too fast, largely because of the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. The economy-spurring solutions traditionally favored by each party — Democrats want to spend more on jobs programs, Republicans favor cutting taxes to put more money back into private hands — exacerbate the deficit. Meanwhile, the parties are at loggerheads over how to put Washington's fiscal house in order.

America has tried the Republican “cut spending, cut taxes, and cut ‘entitlements’” and the Democrat “protect ‘entitlements,’ provide tax-payer supported stimulus, lower middle and working class taxes, tax the rich and redistribute” brands of economic policy, as well as a mixture of both. Republican ideology aims to revive hard-nosed laissez-faire appeals to hard-core conservatives but ignores the relevancy of healing the economy and halting the steady disintegration of the middle class and working poor.

Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration wrote today:

[President Obama's] victory and the pending 'fiscal cliff' give him an opportunity to recast the economic debate. Our central challenge, he should say, is not to reduce the budget deficit. It’s to create more good jobs, grow the economy, and widen the circle of prosperity."The deficit is a problem only in proportion to the overall size of the economy. If the economy grows faster than its current 2 percent annualized rate, the deficit shrinks in proportion. Tax receipts grow, and the deficit becomes more manageable.

But if economic growth slows – as it will, if taxes are raised on the middle class and if government spending is reduced when unemployment is still high – the deficit becomes larger in proportion. That’s the austerity trap Europe finds itself in. We don’t want to go there.

"Create more good jobs" is understandable; "grow the economy" is understandable, but "widen the circle of prosperity" is vague.

I believe the solution to how to move forward is to first acknowledge that due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production there is a paradigm shift exponentially occurring in the way products and services are produced, with far, far less reliance on labor worker input, and far, far, greater reliance on the non-human means to create efficiency, lower costs, and produce more and better quality products and services with less labor.

While the Los Angeles Times editorial board offers no solution, Reich's solution is the Democratic Party's approach, which is to tax the ownership class and redistribute income as well as to borrow more monies, all of which is pledged to stimulate JOB CREATION through government taxpayer spending in the private and public sectors. A better solution would be to support this approach but to stipulate that the end result of the spending first assures that private, individual ownership of the assets underlying the new economic growth is broadened, followed by REAL job creation.

We need, as a nation, to embrace and educate our people to understand and fully participate in the building of an OWNERSHIP CULTURE as the foundation for "widening the circle of prosperity" and thereby increasing the taxable base and monies to the treasury to eliminate deficits and pay off our national debt.

We can no longer tolerate the further OWNERSHIP CONCENTRATION of business corporations who structurally own the productive assets of our future growth. We must implement financial mechanisms that will enable ordinary Americans, and EVERY child, woman and man to acquire ownership of NEW, productive capital assets (without taking anything aways from those who own current assets) and pay for their acquisition out of the future earnings of their investments. Thus, we will begin to put the emphasis on economic growth propelled by science, engineering, innovation, and invention that results in new non-human productive means to produce products and services while simultaneously empowering EVERY American to participate as a share owner in the new wealth that will be created and be entitled to the income streams generated by the investments in our future.

Support the Capital Homestead Act athttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm andhttp://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-president-election-20121107,0,3652828.story

It bugs the heck out of me that a non-elected, non-office holding demagogue like Grover Norquist has some mafia-style death kiss on hos GOP followers. The GOP needs to grow some gonads (and brains) and start representing their constituents instead of worrying about some signing a pledge baloney. If that GOP truly wants to grow their base, they won't find a growing supply of angry old white men to count on. America is changing, and instead of pandering to the extremists, let the extremists go and start their own damn party. It may not always be the case that a GOP presidential candidate is a non-starter for a centrist or moderate, but when you vote for one, you are assured that the baggage of religious zealots, anti-evolution, anti-science, anti equal rights, etc. crowd comes with them, and we don't want that.

What I fear (and believe) is a quote from Norm Ornstein:

"The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges."

An historic reelection of a Black Man as President. A repudiation of the language of hate and misogyny of extremist Conservatives. Yet Republicans are again, in the face of this election, doubling down, conceding nothing. And the Electoral Map echos a frightening specter of history... does anybody else see a division similar to the Civil War? Does anybody hear a similar clinging to their views and values, a refusal to see that the world is changing, a strident call to have their own way despite the fact that it could tear this country apart?

Boehner and the gang may well practice the same hostage-taking approach to the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling as they did last time, but it certainly hurt them with voters at the polls. Here in MN, we were victims of the 2010 repub lunatic wave, and as a result, we got a government shutdown and an increase in property taxes for everyone because the hostage takers, (GOTP), refused to add a very small tax on incomes over a million dollars a year. The result? Last night, dems retook both the state House and Senate. People are fed up with the "my way or the highway" approach that repubs are using at every level of government. Boehner is a puppet that has to do whatever his Tea Party masters tell him to do, but in the end, both will be taken down by Americans who want to see compromise and progress on dealing with our nation's issues. Coming from an institution that is polling around 10% in popularity right now, I'd say Boehner is holding a losing hand.

Rachel and still they are not hearing it. The people have spoken and the republicans need to reorganize and work with President Obama for the Good of our great nation. Love your reporting particularly on the voter frauds and suppression that was so prevalent in this election...and Still, Obama and so many democrats won. God Bless America and you Rachel.

Perhaps most importantly, the party wants to win but doesn't want to change.

There is a reason they are called "Conservatives"; because they tend to resist change, even to the detriment of their own party. Our country has changed in some areas like demographics; equal rights (for women and the GLBT community); religious practice; foreign policy; technology; alternative energy, the need for education; the need for healthcare reform; etc. But in the face of all of this, the Republicans tend to embrace a warped sense of extremist Christian ideologue, indoctrinate that into obsolete social/foreign/fiscal policies, and scratch their heads when they lose an election.

A flying car is to Democrats as a horse & buggy are to Republicans.

I am a Democrat and has voted for the GOP a couple of times in the past. But as of the past 15 to 20 years, the GOP has become so weird. They always seem to be the party to have some lunatics with beliefs that make you have to scratch your head and ask what did I just hear him say. Until they realize that the white male vote is becoming a minority among the other ethnic groups out here, they will continue to lose. They first need to move a little to the middle and let go of some of those crazy ideas they have. You know, that they are the only party that cannot just flat out tell you where they stand on the really ludicrous of beliefs they have. They all seem to try and skirt, dip, and dodge the questions. Or if they do stand by their belief, and state their reasons, it becomes apparant that they are borderline insane. Take the Akins and Murdock guys in particular. They were off the charts. The GOP needs to come back down to the real world with the rest of us. Stop trying to be greedy and think along the lines with mainstream America. That is their problem. Let this election be a lesson to them. I truly believe that they are under the assumption that it is a "them against us" mentality. I hope they never figure it out. The GOP is one group that could go extinct. Along with the Tea party.

To get the Republicans in the house to actually compromise, it is going to be necessary for the administration to demonstrate to them that the administration actually has leverage. For example, allowing everyone to fall over the "fiscal cliff" and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire would probably get the house Republicans to agree to talk about compromise that isn't just about what they want and get them to a solution quickly and efficiently. The time for "reaching across the aisle" is long past.

Remember when Grover Norquist said that the GOP didn't need a Presidential candidate who could DO anything... they just needed someone who was capable of signing his name on any bill they put in front of him?

Well, THAT is why there are no more leaders in the GOP. They're all trying to be "the hand that signs the bill", and in order to be that, they not only have to eliminate any and all original thought, but swear allegiance to a set of ideals that are 40+ years behind the American reality of 2012.

The GOP is unable to reinvent itself because it's only constitutency is the 1% and their ilk. When you are tied to one basic proposition-low taxes and small government-you can't broaden your base when those policies are inimical to those you are trying to attract.

republicans have typically tried to creat false constitutencies using race, financial exploitation, etc to attract enough voters to pass their protect the rich at any cost agenda.

The danger republicans pose is that the concentration of wealth that has been increasing over the last 30+ years and has created a wealthy elite who can influence legislation, markets, etc regardless of who is in power.

Until the GOP gets rid of the nutjobs, such as Akins and Murdock, and then come back down to Earth with the rest of us, they will forever be losers. They must know that the white male/female vote that they count on so heavily will be a minority group really soon. They need to diversify. Move a little to the middle on some issues and try to get Hispanics, blacks, and other ethnic groups on their team. Until that happens they will do nothing but alienate themselves to the point where they will become extinct as a party. As far as I am concerned, with the way they think about the American people, becoming extinct isn't such as bad thing.

You would think that the Republicans in Congress who lost some seats last night, would come out and say they are willing to work with the President rather then deny that Obama has a mandate. He does have a mandate the people have spoken. I will go even further by saying that if the Republicans continue to play the grid lock game, in two years the lose of Republican seats will make it very clear what the people want.

Republican 2012 campaign spending about $1B. Republican angst over Obama win = PRICELESS! Congratulations Obama from Maui!

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

Thank you President Obama. We're now one step closer to a dictatorship...