It just keeps getting worse. My wife and I made the decision over a month ago that we were not going to vote in the presidential race. I had come to the conclusion that both Romney and Obama met the Biblical definition of a false teacher and we are instructed to not give such even a greeting. I understand the nation elects a president not a preacher, but that Biblical principle is sound and applicable in these circumstances. And when I read that on the very day the Graham ads begin to run he is meeting with the Log Cabin Republicans (whose endorsement he ultimately garnered) and when his surrogates in swing states begin telling potential supporters not to worry about Roe v. Wade immediately after the first debate it is sickening.
Evangelicals need to realize that we are called to make disciples and be witnesses for Christ and continuing the fetish we have exhibited for 36 years for political power must stop. Many of our pastors got involved this time. Think about this — we believe that the leaders of nations are chosen in the sovereign providence of God. The mechanism for that choice here is democratic elections, but the result of that choice is in God’s hands. We now have hundreds of pastors who stood in their pulpits, used their God given authority and directly encouraged their people to do something that is demonstrably contrary to God’s will. Encouraging them to vote, to engage in the process by which God’s will works itself out would not be so bad, but to directly advocate for an earthly political leader damages them, impacts their people and raises barriers to making disciples and being witnesses. Every single one should humbly repent and given other Christ followers an example that may help lower those barriers in the weeks and months to come.
I have been truly appalled by the things that have started to come out about this campaign. I believe if we had been following Biblical principles, informing ourselves and demonstrating wisdom and discernment, Christ followers should have just refused to cast a ballot in this presidential race. Neither man, neither campaign was worthy of our support.

Dear Reader:

Far be it from me to advance a “conspiracy theory” to explain the results
of the 2012 presidential election. I refuse to do that. Frankly, the people who
advance such theories on a routine basis make me more suspicious of them than
the situation they are describing. But neither do I believe in multiple
coincidences. Not when the control of the government of the United States is at
issue. Not when the future of the world is at stake. And not when, in criminal
law parlance, there is motive and opportunity.

That said, I was taken aback by the election results. They raise in my mind
one pivotal question: How could a president who is a pathological liar and
has a track record of failure in foreign and domestic affairs–which is obvious
to anyone who has been paying attention, manage to win re-election against a
candidate who appeared to have the credentials and track record required to
rescue the country from the current malaise, and who was in fact prevailing
according to credible pollsters until the last minute?

Big media would have us believe that the election result is
attributable to changing demographics. However, that argument assumes
that age, race and gender trump judgment. Furthermore, big media tells us that
the Republican Party is controlled by the Tea Party, who are racist to
the core. Yet they offer no proof. Finally, big media is joined at the hip to
Obama, and has undermined every opponent he has had, from Hillary, to McCain, to
Romney. It therefore follows that we should be skeptical of any explanation big
media presumes to offer, to cover up their own corruption. In legal parlance,
their explanations are tainted with bias and/or self interest.

Republicans on the other hand, have their own explanations for the
election result. For example, Grass Roots Republicans claim that Romney
was not conservative enough. That argument assumes that conservative social
issues are wildly popular in battleground states–a dubious proposition at best.
Meanwhile, Establishment Republicans offer an entirely different
explanation. They claim that their message is fine, but Romney ran a poor
campaign, failed to appeal to Hispanics, and lacked the massive ground
gameof their opponent. They forget the fact that he was their candidate. They
forget the fact that in bad economic times, most people prefer more government
help not less
.

In my view, none of these explanations suffice. If you set aside
conventional wisdom and connect the cots, it becomes obvious that reason Romney
lost because the election process itself was rigged–to a degree most of
us neither realize, comprehend, or care to admit. The conventional response to
that statement is predictable: Tell me who rigged this election and how they did
that, so I can disprove what you say, and dismiss you as a tin foil hat job! No
thank you. I am not walking into that trap. I will merely refer you to something
Ben Hogan said when he was asked a question about his classic golf swing: “Dig
it out of the ground like I did”. If you investigate the possibility that the
election was rigged rather than dismissing it out of hand, and if you are
educable, then it is quite possible you will learn something in the
process.

To that end, the following fact patterns and anomalies are material:

1. In 2008, John McCain was leading in the polls six weeks before the
election. Then came the financial crash. Thereafter he lost the election.

2. Financial markets have been known to crash like this, once every eighty
years.

3. Human beings have the ability to cause markets to crash. Soros did this
in Britain in 1992, and in Asia in 1998

4. In 2012, Mitt Romney was surging in the polls a week before the
election. Then came the hurricane Sandy. Thereafter he lost the election.

5. No prior hurricane has devastated all major battleground states to this
degree. Was this the long awaited Was this the long awaited October
surprise?

6. Human beings have the ability to manipulate weather patterns. Bush 43
set up project HAARP to generate sand storms in Iraq. Obama has expanded
it

7. Voting machines in swing states switched Romney votes to Obama. How
widespread this was has not been determined.

8. The DNC targeted Republican Allen West.

9. His vote count changed abruptly, he lost, and a court ordered recount is
now in progress

10 The Obama campaign designed its website to accept illegal foreign
donations.

11 One of his foreign bundlers Roach is closely connected to the government
of Red China.

12 Obama received a wall of untraceable money– with hidden strings
attached to it.

13 Would a market crash or a hurricane visited on the largest battleground
states on the eve of the election favor the candidate who advocates big
government?

14 Would a market crash or a hurricane divert public attention from a
massive cheating operation in battleground states? Or from the Benghazi
scandal?

15 Would a mind capable of dropping bombs on a civilian population have
moral compunctions against crashing markets and creating storms to secure
political power?

Either you believe in multiple coincidences, or you do not. If you believe
in them, then you will accept the conventional wisdom and fail to connect the
dots. That is how your mind works. But if these fact patterns and anomalies make
you curious, or even a trifle suspicious, given all that is at stake, then you
will get the sense that maybe–just maybe, you are not being told the truth, and
you may find yourself repeating the words of Marc Anthony:” Oh mischief thou art
afoot”.

Under Obama, we are drifting toward a one party system based on the Chicago
model. That model rewards connected insiders, disenfranchises the electorate,
and bleeds the middle class dry. The American People must question conventional
wisdom and start by asking the right questions. Otherwise, the republic will be
lost. When Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia and was asked by a passerby what kind of government we have, he
replied “A republic sir–if you can keep it”. Nunc pro tunc–then as now.
And the quickest way to lose a Republic is to allow unscrupulous politicians
like Obama to bribe you with your own money.

NO, his central message was that smaller government and encouragement rather than the attacking of businesses make for an economic environment in which people can prosper and then hire others….JOBS.

LOLLLLLLLL

1. “I refuse to advance conspiracy theories”

2. “Obama caused the hurricane to win the election.”

skldjfhaskljfhashjahahjahjah

Minor Correction as to your quote;

“As they say in poker, ‘If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.’”

Warren E. Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, in the company’s annual report.

Unlike runner12, I don’t say this with respect: You’re despicable. And gone.

I know you’re gone, but talk to someone who has no religious freedom and get back to us (or not). Actually, you may not have that long to wait considering you sat on your hands and did nothing to fight the evil that is upon us.

Not surprised to read a piece like this about the consultants. Remember when it came out that the Romney campaign was paying big, unorthodox bonuses to its staff, even before the Romney poll surge happened with the Denver debate?

I can believe this. Last year SSG ran the Lucien Smith campaign for Treasurer in Mississippi. Two other opponents in the primary. One was a one term state senator with no money, the other was the head of the state civil service who never held elected office and was an unknown. Mr. Smith was a 30 year old lawyer for Haley. Totally outraised everyone. Around a half a million dollars or so which for that race is huge. Was backed by what we call the bond cartel (you can figure that out).

You will recognize what I am about to write. Bland commercials. Little ground game. Commercials that all pros thought were pretty bad. Substantial amounts of money were not spent. He did not even make the run off despite killing them in fundraising in a race where literally everyone was an unknown. Stuart ran it and it was considered to be a big con job as what was posted above.

I donated three, but I would not say that this was Romney’s doing necessarily, but as “the buck stops here” it certainly belongs to him. I would guess that Steve Schmidt is the guy that deserves more blame than Romney, because Romney wasn’t running his campaign, Schmidt was. Of course, Romney choosing Schmidt probably was one of the most stupid things he could do; a prominent member of the McCain team was not what Romney needed.

You mean like Romney hired Steve Schmidt?

I wonder if the software was actually written in India…

The idiom means it was happening very close to him but he didn’t notice it. That is unacceptable, as Mitt Romney well knows having been in business for decades. Yes, he should have known his campaign was being badly mismanaged. Even I could tell that his senior advisers like Myers and Fehrnstrom were losers. As the “CEO” it was his JOB to know these things.

There was huge warnings about Stu Stevens for a long time. It was Stuie who threw out some really good conservative speeches that had been written for Romney’s convention address, and then wrote the POS that he did put out, in the last 48 hours. Not a single mention of our guys on the front to boot. I wondered at the time what sort of stupid planning would allow for that – you don’t write a major speech 48 hours in advance. Now I know.

Sorry, this is all laid at Romney’s feet. People tried to warn him that Stuie was out of control. Now that I see these details, I am not surprised.

The ORCA concept was good, but the comments at AOS were spot on. I’ve put together huge internet GIS and Oracle databases with gigabytes of data throughput (in the 90s, when the world was young). Its still working well, but I wouldn’t do the same thing today. And I wouldn’t roll it out, untested, on the day of the election. They can say what they want. This was a major clusterfark.

Our central economic premise is that private enterprise works better than the government. Pushing this storyline too hard would seem to be walking into a straight right punch.

Please remember – software programs are mostly written in California by liberals who then get venture capitalists to help them become billion dollar companies on the NYSE.

I’m curious now as to who WROTE the code for ORCA? What were their political affiliations? Just wunderin’….

I think Chris Christie will find that he’s burned his bridges now with the Republican base. He certainly has with me.

Romney was a bad candidate. The early Republican leadership that endorsed him should be called to the task.

Sure, if people were voting based on John McCain’s endorsement.

ORCA was a waste, but it did not diminish our GOTV. It cannot be blamed for the loss. Neither can the deficiencies in the campaign people, though I agree with the frustration and that had they done better, maybe we could have overcome the fraud.

I am convinced the election was stolen. There is no way Romney got fewer votes than McCain. McCain (and even Sarah) never had rallies of the massive sort we saw from October on. You just do not turn out 40K for a rally in Bucks county (way more than 2008, and with wild enthusiasm) and lose the vote there. Even in my liberal district, Romney got 6% MORE votes than McCain. In Republican districts, you can bet the pro-Romney turnouts were enormous. As a GOTV worker, I did not need to encourage my contacts to vote – they could not wait. Not one was anti-Mormon. Plus we had TONS of volunteers to get out the vote. And how do you lose all but one swing state? That’s highly unlikely by definition, and especially in a year like this.

We were all stunned, and it wasn’t because of believing rosy predictions from Boston. If it doesn’t comport with what you knew to be true based on your own eyes and ears, then there must be another explanation. In 2008 we were not surprised. This time the world turned upside down. Even some local Dems were surprised – I overheard a Dem professional poll watcher say she thought it was going to be a bad night (as an aside, the Dems don’t send volunteers to watch, they send lawyers). Even Jim Moran’s son thought this would be tough for Obama.

I personally witnessed several instances of voter fraud as an election officer, and my fellow poll watchers at other precincts, more likely to have fraud, saw it on a massive scale. Not to mention the ease with which viruses can be entered on these machines to change votes, as exposed by CNN. Also, in my precinct, people were saying their votes were coming out wrong, just as we’ve seen recently across the country. Provisional ballots were pre-filled-out for Obama. And don’t forget the efforts of that Voter Participation Center that was registering dead people and pets across the country.

Now recall that the Obama folks say they will not share their GOTV secrets with other Democrat candidates. Why? Maybe because their GOTV secret is voter fraud? If too many people are let in on it someone could leak.

The RNC and state GOPs should demand that the machines be impounded and checked for virus infiltration, at a minimum. Those votes stolen the old-fashioned way would be harder to discover.

We lost the Presidential when we couldn’t get someone like Mitch Daniels to run. These tactical errors were bad, but they don’t explain the Senate. It’s too easy to blame consultants instead of looking clearly at what we face.

16. Have you noticed that Big Aluminum has subtly changed the color of the tinfoil in your hat? Coincidence? I think not!

About two or three, maybe.

Can you stop copy-pasting the same claptrap?

It’s a rule. “Republican in the general”.

Although people ought to get what they voted for, or failed to vote against.

?!!

Colonel West was done in by awful redistricting by the Florida GOP. Add that to their awful inability to win politically even on the state level. Scott is radioactive.

I think this quote (ironically, from a book about consulting) applies well here:

Each act that expresses trust in ourselves and belief in the validity of our own experience is always the right path to follow. Each act that is manipulative or filled with
pretense is always self-destructive.
(Peter Block)

…and maybe this one, too:

Some people try to find things in this game that don’t exist but football is only two things – blocking and tackling.
(Vince Lombardi)

The Democrats’ program was years in the making. They embraced the data-based approach early, so Republicans were forced to play catchup.

The RNC needs to learn from this and keep building the data infrastructure needed to compete with the Democrats’ version, so that way 2016 is a fair fight.

This. You can bet your behind that the Obama campaign employs most of the people who write code for them.

The really major WTF moment here is that they apparently never load-tested it until election day. I’m not surprised that the Romney campaign approached technology like a bunch of suits from the 90s, since that’s what he is (nothing against him, just when was he in business last). But I’m blown away that nobody raised their hand and suggested load testing.

You can fail early and fix, or fail late and critically.

Their fundamental design (11 DB servers on the backend with a single (apparently non-redundant) webserver on the front end) was grotesquely flawed. This would have been a braindead easy implementation on AWS. It would have been easily scalable and far more fault-tolerant. The Obama GOTV campaign software was designed and implemented by top-flight software architects and engineers from major companies who were also passionate about the candidate. Romney got some suits who talk a good game and bill $250/hour, but apparently know nothing about systems design and architecture.

I am actually more worried about my money going to line the pockets of worthless moochers, who have eroded our national character to the point where we re-elect the most vapid, worthless man to ever run for office. Since we DIDN’T elect Romney, that’s the program that will continue.

And FYI, when you defecate, a toilet is recommended. Not a police car. Now run along and find a soldier to spit on. But something tells me you’ll only do that once, pal.

That’s the first thing you have said in a long time that I agree with, so I wanted to take this opportunity to point that out.

Yes, lets not let facts get in the way of a good premise. After all, Romney was not going to let fact-checking dictate to his campaign.

the base didn’t come out. Romney won independents, had democrats come out in lower numbers than 2008, and underperformed McCain in Ohio. the republicans had numbers they had to hit in the turnout, and did not hit it, no ifs ands or buts about it.

His management failure was not in failing to micromanage the project, but in his willingness to surrender arguably the most critical part of his GOTV infrastructure to consultants without, at a bare minimum, having adult supervision by someone who knows how to manage a time-critical software development effort and who can spot BS when they hear it.

Well stated. And the Rhoades vs. Axelrod argument simply makes the point even more strongly — who you hire to do the job DEFINES how well you do your job as a manager, especially in an organization as large/complex as a campaign.

Bush gets full credit for Rove. Obama gets full credit for his (painfully competent) team of Messina/Axelrod/Plouffe. And Romney gets the full blame for not having the basic data, not knowing how to manage a modern enterprise software project (no QA? no on-site stress tests? holy crap), not knowing how to diversify his data sources to cross-check their validity, etc, etc. Color me disgusted.

When it’s mission critical, non-zexy is best. The more I read about this more astounding it is. You don’t need zexy. I said it over in the ORCA vs. Norwhal thread, again: you need to make sure 37,000 people get 30-50 duplex printed sheets and some other credentials? FedEx Overnight, even the USPS Express Mail, and you’re looking at $25 per person tops to *make sure* they’ve got what they need. You don’t chance it. My internet was dead in the water on election night and so was my “Vonage Device.”

Zexy is nice but unless you honestly balance the potential failure points against the zexiness, you’re deceiving yourself. Operations Research. It sounds like the Romney campaign didn’t have a few extra wise old Operations Research people on hand to introduce some circumspect thinking.

In cases like this, you need people with the materials guaranteed to be in their hands and ready to hit the ground running. They MUST have them. The system needs to be built so that it makes sure the *imperatives* occur, despite the “known knowns” and the “known unknowns” and even trying to take into account the “unknown unknowns.”

forget 2016! 2014 is a fair fight!

AMEN!

Obama is good campaigner but a lousy President. Nothing in his stunning campaign of 2008 translated into his competence as president, except ofr his ability to give good teleprompter’d speeches.

The 2012 campaign was a shadow of 2008, but it ‘worked’ thanks to media bias pulling for Obama, a good base-turnout operation by Team Obama, driven in turn by the billions worth of graft and panders that the President could offer, and continued milking of celebrity connections (The View, etc).

The GOTV failures by Romney campaign is frustrating and may well have made the difference. But there were serious weaknesses in messaging: The campaign didnt respond enough to attacks on Romney, and didnt go hard enough at Obama to tie his policies to the economic failures and misery we face right now. The stunning fact that Americans feel 2 to 1 that we are on the wrong track, BUT a majority of voters blame our current economic situation on a guy who was retired 4 years ago … that is stunning. if people are still blaming Bush for the fact that our deficits are too big and growth this year is too slow then (a) there’s quite a bit of economic illiteracy out there, and (b) The Romney campaign didnt do its job.

Cold comfort to know that Obama was beatable and that this loss was due to tactical and strategic errors and not a fundamental shift in the voters.

I love Marco Rubio…but next election..if we have a USA…it better be a governor with some experience…AND NOT CHRIS CHRISTIE EITHER.

Nope. The polls were on a up swing for Obama before Sandy hit. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nate-silver/

All of that is great advice advice and you’re on fire here with the prescription. I think you add a “shadow” team that works in parallel to develop Plan B in the event Plan A doesn’t work properly, particularly in places with service outages, device outages, and just plain incompetence and befuddlement.

The A team and the B team cannot be purely antagonistic even though they’re taking different approaches: they have to cooperate. What you need to guarantee is that you have “limp home” capability. Whenever and wherever Plan A fails, you have to have a fallback.

It’s going to cost more to have that, but from what I witnessed on election night you can’t do without it. I couldn’t have helped GoTV efforts after 5pm here through the internet or my telephone if I had wanted to. I could have done it from my mobile device but again, only if the signal was available. Believe it or not even 3G is still not reliable.

You have to think about what you’ll do if none of that works.

You call Team A “Mission: Impossible” and Team B the “Dirty Dozen” and they have to coordinate to try to fill in the gaps from each other.

We haven’t become allergic, but you’re right that the media on both sides is more concerned with “selling a product” than providing the truth, more interested in telling a narrative than giving the facts. It’s all about sensationalism.

That’s one of the biggest reasons I’m thankful for the internet. To be sure, you can also lose yourself in an online echo chamber, and surround yourself with only the things you want to hear. I think even this site, though it was a rare slip-up, fell into the same pattern of confirmation bias leading up to election day. But in good hands and with the right mindset, our ready access to information and ability to fact check both sides in real time is an asset. It’s up to the electorate to make reality a priority, if the media has left it by the wayside. Let’s not drop the ball.

An engaged electorate wouldn’t simply stop watching Fox News, but demand as its loyal viewership that it remain extra vigilant for examples of confirmation bias, or for stories like the one written here. Information is power, and if we allow ideological fellowship to take its place (as it clearly did in this election), then we’re in for a lot more election day surprises that won’t be pleasing to anyone. Just because Fox does a better job than the other networks, don’t be afraid to shout loud and clear when they also make mistakes. An informed electorate is the brick and mortar of democracy.

Can we not talk about Palin? Ever? Really, I don’t just mean right now. I mean, can we never mention her again? No one even puts her on screen anymore except as a target for liberals to laugh at. Every day she’s allowed to be associated with the party, she damages the conservative image. Enough is enough.

Imagine what the country would be like if McCain had picked a halfway respectable or intelligent running mate. Imagine if he’d picked someone like Ryan. Essentially, imagine starting over from January, 2009. Imagine a complete mulligan from the last day of Bush’s presidency, where Obama was never more than a losing candidate. That’s what the world looks like without Palin.

Sorry, is my resentment showing?

I am sick of all the rampant paranoia in the conservative movement right now. If you believe what you hear from the base, apparently there are Democrat moles everywhere, under every rock, every tree, every bed.

The polls were rigged against us. The software was rigged against us. Voting procedures were rigged against us. The media — well, yes, the media actually is against us. But that’s nothing new.

Point is, all this conspiracy stuff is really just an attempt to shift the blame elsewhere. Just like our parents taught us, we need to look at our own mistakes first, before we go around blaming others for our problems.

Here’s Romney’s political epitaph for you, commonsense: Worse than McCain.

Let’s all remember that when Tagg gears up for his inevitable run. You’ll know it’s for real when we hear about him running for some Congressional seat or governorship in 2014.

I agree about two of them but I stand with Ann Coulter in believing Romney is uniquely qualified to address America’s fiscal problems. As good a nominee as he was, he wasn’t a great campaigner.

Actually, Romney had a 10% increase in Christian votes over McCain. I saw the report at American Spectator. Even evangelicals increased their support.

I agree. What the people in this country need is to realize that they can’t turn to only one source of information for balanced coverage. We must read and watch both sides to really know what’s going on because both sides leave stuff out. In the mainstream media’s side that meant Obama’s involvement in Benghazi and Obama’s failure to make any real changes in Sandy’s cleanup and his involvement in Fast and Furious and his dedication to raising taxes across the board and making the welfare state a plurality. www.conservativemormonmom.blogspot.com

Thanks— your comments are also always good to read!

Thumbs up for you. This absolutely critical to any application. You do NOT write the application first and then try to “bolt on” security.

Awwww…too bad I deleted it.

Having lived on this earth a fair amount of time, I’ll just say that those who would do the former are not too far from doing the latter. Perhaps you have forgotten the treatment soldiers and seamen received upon coming home from Vietnam. Most of my friends who served have not.

My priorities are fine, and thank your family for their service.

To everyone complaining about Fox News: Fox is doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Fox News is a business. Their goal is to maximize revenue (and secondarily, influence), and they are extremely good at doing that.

Their goal is not, and never has been, to win elections.

(Spoiler alert: Winning elections is not the primary goal of most political web sites either, if you haven’t figured that out.)

This idea of holding Fox “accountable” for hiding the full truth from us is like holding your doctor accountable for hiding the full truth about your car’s muffler. It’s not their job, and you make a categorical mistake if you think it is.

Believing everything you see on Fox News with full credulity makes you a useful idiot, as much as it would if you believed everything on CNN, MSNBC, etc, etc. Watch Fox the way you use Twitter — as a way to direct your attention to stories that you then go ELSEWHERE to understand in real depth. Align your usage of Fox with their actual intentions (instead of what you hope or wish their intentions were), and you might find some value there.

Replace Romney campaign with McCain campaign. You hire liberal consultants to consult with a moderate liberal candidate and you get mush. The same mush Obama was spouting. Of course millions of people knew that Romney’s mush was true while Obama’s mush was a lie but for the muddleheaded uninformed they looked about the same. The screw up was not the campaign the screw up was the candidate. It doesn’t matter if Romney would have been a good president (we hoped) you have to win the election to be president. Reagan did not win against Carter by only offering jobs he won by comparing ideologies and why Carters was wrong for America. Romney did not have the core beliefs that Reagan was able to draw on and articulate.

Not tactical and not strategic, ideological and the ability to articulate it to a stupid uninformed electorate.

Your going to have to give up some of your positions . Gay marriage is strongly supported by youth . IF you could coincide that one point you’ll do a bit better with youth .

The problem is the republican base wants you to keep with the same old view points …You’ll do fine in 2014, the Dem party doesn’t have the same youth outreach power as the Obama campaign .

I’ve seen quite a few blame game articles here, not so many lets revise the gameplan articles( aside from convincing Libertarians to come back into the fold, which is a lost cause )

Tagg Romney gave us Paul Ryan.

But, no, the Romney sons, as I see it, aren’t really cut out for politics.

Worse than McCain? Senator McCain, with all due respect, has been in a position to inflict a lot more harm than Governor Romney, as he has.

Well, we can’t blame Allen West for that…

do you want a tin foil hat to go with your conspiracy theory?

No. They will probably be on another GOP campaign in a few years, relabeled and repurposed. The talent pool is not that deep if you want political fealty from your developers on the right.

Our crony capitalist mythology in a microcosm.