I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.

Barack Obama

Firsts

pantslessprogressive:

• First time same-sex marriage is legalized by state ballot measure (and in three states: ME, MD and WA); 
• First openly gay female senator (WI’s Tammy Baldwin);
• First disabled female veteran in Congress (IL’s Tammy Duckworth);
• First Asian-American (and first Buddhist) female Senator (HI’s Mazie Hirono);
• First state dominated by female federal leaders (NH has a female Democratic governor, two female Senators and two Congresswomen). 

The Five Stages of Conservative Grief 

Final outcome.

barackobama:

Four more years.

Shooting the Messenger’s Numbers

Nate Silver, the famed statistician behind the FiveThirtyEight election forecast blog at the New York Times, is wrong. And gay. At least according to the more virulent elements of right-wing media. That he’s wrong is only confirmed by his gayness, just as surely as his gayness is the source of his wrongness. Nate Silver is a tautology of being queer as hell about everything.

Hardcore conservatism’s loathing of science has lurked around GOP politics for so long that its easy to forget how nasty it is. Over 40 years, that disdain has slid from “pointy-headed intellectuals” to something very like a jock slapping a math book out of a kid’s hands and saying, “NICE NUMBERS, FAG.” But this is what you do when you can’t crunch the numbers yourself or when they will not save you. You shoot the messenger.

Nate Silver’s Struggle

Koch Industries warns employees of "consequences" if they don’t vote for Republicans

Fact-Checking the Debate

Think Progress, The Chicago Tribune, The Daily Beast, Politico and FactCheck.org sorted through last night’s claims.

The obvious responsible thing to do when American citizens and public officials are under physical threat abroad and when the details are unknown, and events spiraling, is to stay silent. If the event happens on the day of September 11 and you are a candidate for president and have observed a political truce, all the more reason to wait to allow the facts to emerge. After all, country before party, right? American lives are at stake, yes? An easy call, no? But that’s not what the Romney camp did. What they did was seize on a tweet issued by someone in the US Embassy before the attacks in order to indict the president for “sympathizing” with those who murdered a US ambassador after the attacks. Unfuckingbelievable.

Andrew Sullivan 

Romney Adviser: Under President Romney, Libya Attack Never Would Have Happened

kohenari:

In a fascinating twist, the Romney camp has switched from attacking President Obama for apologizing and sympathizing with those who attacked American embassies — which was patently untrue — to simply blaming Obama for the attacks themselves and hypothesizing that an Imaginary President Romney would have prevented those attacks:

A top foreign policy aide to Mitt Romney suggested Thursday that the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens would never have happened if Romney were president. There wouldn’t even be anti-American protests in the Middle East if Romney were in charge, the aide said.

“There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation,” Romney adviser Richard Williamson told the Washington Post. “For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we’ve had an American ambassador assassinated.”

He blamed the attack that killed Stevens on Obama’s handling of the region, arguing that the Muslim world would have held the hypothetical Romney administration of 2008-2012 in much greater esteem, which would have prevented violent protests over an anti-Muslim film like the one that led to Stevens’s death.

“In Egypt and Libya and Yemen, again demonstrations — the respect for America has gone down, there’s not a sense of American resolve and we can’t even protect sovereign American property,” he said.

“If only Mitt Romney could be our president right now so that nothing bad would ever happen to America.”

“Why wouldn’t anything bad ever happen?”

“Because of respect and resolve and other good things that Mitt Romney always does and Barack Obama never does. And no apologies. And America.”

In a recent poll taken in Ohio, nearly one in six Republicans said Mitt Romney deserved more credit for killing Osama bin Laden than President Obama.