Romney campaign cut off funds, credit cards to staffers on Election Night

In wake of the Romney campaign’s Nov. 6 defeat, organizers tie up loose ends, including conserving campaign cash and finding new work for staffers.

Team Romney acted fast to sever its staff’s access to campaign funds Tuesday after the Republican candidate’s crushing defeat by President Obama.

NBC News reported that campaign aides taking cabs home late on Election Night found that their campaign-issued credit cards had already been cut off.

The campaign’s Boston headquarters was mostly packed by the end of the day Wednesday, NBC said.

But while the campaign may have cut off their credit cards, the candidate is not cutting his staff loose entirely.

According to The Washington Post, when a supporter asked Romney if he planned a post-campaign vacation, the Republican reportedly said he would be “really busy.”

“I have 400 people to get great jobs for,” he said.

Credit : NY Daily News

FL Election Results 2012: Barack Obama Defeats Mitt Romney

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — President Barack Obama was declared the winner of Florida's 29 electoral votes Saturday, ending a four-day count with a razor-thin margin that narrowly avoided an automatic recount that would have brought back memories of 2000.

No matter the outcome, Obama had already clinched re-election and now has 332 electoral votes to Romney's 206.

The Florida Secretary of State's Office said that with almost 100 percent of the vote counted, Obama led Republican challenger Mitt Romney 50 percent to 49.1 percent, a difference of about 74,000 votes. That was over the half-percent margin where a computer recount would have been automatically ordered unless Romney had waived it.

There is a Nov. 16 deadline for overseas and military ballots, but under Florida law, recounts are based on Saturday's results. Only a handful of overseas and military ballots are believed to remain outstanding.

It's normal for election supervisors in Florida and other states to spend days after any election counting absentee, provisional, military and overseas ballots. Usually, though, the election has already been called on election night or soon after because the winner's margin is beyond reach.

"Florida has spoken loudly in support of moving our nation forward," Ashley Walker, the Obama campaign's director for Florida, said in a news release. She added that the win was a testament to the campaign's volunteers and staff.

When reached by phone Saturday, Mitt Romney's communications director Gail Gitcho said the campaign had no comment.

Obama's win came in part from heavy support from black, Hispanic and younger voters. Exit polls conducted for The Associated Press showed Obama was favored by more than 9 of 10 black voters and 3 of 5 Hispanic voters in Florida. The president also was the choice of two-thirds of voters under age 30.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney led among both white and older voters.

In the end, the facts of who voted for which candidate in Florida faded into memory as voting issues emerged election night.

On election night this year, it was difficult for officials – and the media – to call the presidential race here, in part because the margin was so close and the voting stretched into the evening.

In Miami-Dade, for instance, so many people were in line at 7 p.m. in certain precincts that some people didn't vote until after midnight.

The hours-long wait at the polls in some areas, a lengthy ballot and the fact that Gov. Rick Scott refused to extend early voting hours has led some to criticize Florida's voting process. Some officials have vowed to investigate why there were problems at the polls and how that led to a lengthy vote count.

If there had been a recount, it would not be as difficult as the lengthy one in 2000. The state no longer uses punch-card ballots, which became known for their hanging chads. All 67 counties now use optical scan ballots where voters mark their selections manually.

Republican George W. Bush won the 2000 contest after the Supreme Court declared him the winner over Democrat Al Gore by a scant 537 votes.

The win gave Obama victories in eight of the nine swing states, losing only North Carolina. In addition to Florida, he won Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada.

Credit : Huffington Post

Bill Maher's Mitt Romney Warning: 'When You Elect Mitt You're Electing Every Right-Wing Nut He's Pandered To In The Last 10 Years'

 

If you're a moderate considering voting for Mitt Romney, there are certain facts you should know... according to Bill Maher. While you may not think the two candidates are terribly different, in Maher's opinion, only one of them is poised to release the Kraken in terms of the religious right:
"When you elect Mitt you're electing every right wing nut he's pandered to in the last 10 years. If the Mitt-mobile does roll into Washington it'll be towing behind it the whole anti-intellectual, anti-Science freakshow."
Watch Maher's stern warning to voters above and let us know what you think. Would President Romney stand-up to the zealot-side of his party or are "standing up" and "Mitt Romney" mutually exclusive concepts?

Credit : Huffington Post

Romney In National Polls Overtaking Obama By Narrow Margin

The national tracking polls released on Thursday had a rare moment of apparent convergence, with most showing Republican nominee Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by small single-digit margins. That uptick was not large enough, for the moment, to undo Obama's edge in the battleground states.
Much of this day-to-day fluctuation in the daily tracking polls is random noise, but for one day, at least, the pattern tipped slightly in Romney's favor. Three of the six daily national tracking polls released on Thursday ticked in Romney's direction, while one moved a point toward Obama and two were unchanged.

Whatever the reason, the shifts helped produce something of a consensus. Six of the eight new polls gave Romney an edge of between 1 and 3 percentage points, and three of the best-known brand names -- Gallup, ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen Reports -- all converged on a 3-point Romney lead.
The HuffPost Pollster tracking model, which combines both national and statewide polls, gives Romney a slight edge in the estimated national popular vote (47.3 percent to 46.9 percent) as of this writing (the estimates update each day as new polls become available). That's a slightly smaller advantage than the RealClearPolitics simple average of recent national polls or the classic Pollster trend chart have estimated (based on national polls alone), because the Pollster tracking model incorporates state-level data and also corrects for pollsters' "house effects" (consistent differences in the results for individual pollsters). That said, the differences between the different aggregation methods is slight. As of this writing, the RealClearPolitics average of Romney's margin is just 0.5 percentage points higher than the Pollster estimate.
Thursday also brought a batch of new polls in the battleground states, including a half-dozen sponsored by interest groups supportive of the Obama campaign, such as Project New America and Health Care for America Now. The tracking model includes this data (as well as a set of state polls released last week by the conservative group Let Freedom Ring), but discounts for the house effects associated with each.

The models indicate, for example, that Project New America pollster Grove Insight demonstrates a statistical bias of roughly 1 percentage point (0.96) in Obama's favor. So it interprets their new poll in Colorado, which gives Obama a 3-point advantage (46 percent to 43 percent) as if it had shown just a 1-point Obama edge (45 percent to 44 percent).
That adjusted result is roughly comparable to another new Colorado survey released on Thursday by NBC News, the Wall Street Journal and Marist College that has the candidates tied at 48 percent. Not surprisingly, the model's current estimate of the standings in Colorado is a 1-point Obama edge (48.0 percent to 47.0 percent) as of this writing -- roughly the same narrow margin that has persisted in Colorado for the past two weeks.

Another Marist/NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in Nevada gives Obama a 3 percentage point advantage (50 percent to 47 percent), just slightly lower than the tracking model's current estimate of a 3.3 percent lead (49.6 percent to 46.3 percent), as of this writing.
In Virginia, four new polls were released on Thursday with results that ranged from a 2-point Romney lead reported in both a live interviewer poll from Fox News and an automated telephone poll from Rasmussen Reports, to a 5-point Obama advantage on an automated Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey sponsored by Health Care for America. The model's current estimate based on all of the recent Virginia polls gives Obama a 1-point edge (48.0 percent to 47.0 percent) as of this writing.
Across all of the battleground states, the polls combine to show the same narrow Obama advantages that have held for the last two weeks in key battleground states like Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa and Ohio. If these leads hold, they would collectively give Obama the 277 electoral votes needed to win, when combined with other states in which he leads by larger margins.

The state estimates produced by the HuffPost Pollster tracking model do take the national polls into account, and for the moment, at least, yesterday's collective uptick for Romney in the national tracking polls has not put a dent in Obama's edge in battleground states. But if that upward trend continues, the margins in these states will narrow and could open up a path to a Romney electoral vote majority.

Credit : Huffington Post

David Siegel Email To Workers Threatens Layoffs If Obama Is Reelected

The super-rich guy who claims he’s the one who got George W. Bush elected is doing everything he can to make sure Mitt Romney wins in November too.
David Siegel, the founder and CEO of giant timeshare company Westgate resorts, sent an opus-like email to his workers, railing against one-percent bashing and arguing that the president’s reelection would “threaten your job.” In the email, obtained by Gawker, Siegel goes on to write:

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, as our current President plans, I will have no choice but to reduce the size of this company.

Siegel has a history of injecting himself in to critical political events. In the “The Queen of Versailles,” the documentary chronicling Siegel’s quest to obnoxiously build the biggest house in America, the Florida real estate mogul claims he was “personally responsible” for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential victory. He also goes on to say that his tactics for helping Bush win “may not necessarily have been legal.”
Siegel isn’t the first CEO to push his political preferences on his employees. Bob Murray, CEO of coal company Murray Energy, allegedly pressured his workers to donate money to the Romney campaign. Murray energy workers have also accused the company of forcing them to participate in a pro-Romney rally, give up a day’s worth of pay and face the possibility of getting fired if they didn’t.
And Richard Lacks, CEO of car parts manufacturer Lacks Enterprises, urged his employees to vote for Romney on the basis of the claim that four more years of Obama would mean a boost in taxes and a decrease in pay. Talk about rocking the vote.

UPDATE: After Gawker published its piece, they spoke to Siegel, who confirmed that he sent the email and that he based it off a chain email that went around before the 2008 elections. "It speaks the truth and it gives [employees] something to think about when they go to the polls," he told Gawker.

Credit : Huffington Post

Politics : Romney's 'Big Bird' comment stirs social media

9:21AM EST October 4. 2012 - Who knew Sesame Street's Big Bird would play a role in Wednesday's presidential debate in Denver?
About 30 minutes into the verbal contest between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the former governor explained that he would cut what he considers non-essential items in the budget, including cuts to PBS, which employs debate moderator Jim Lehrer.
"I'm sorry Jim. I'm gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm gonna stop other things," Romney said. "I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too."
At that point, someone in the Twitterverse responded by creating a @FiredBigBird account, which, as of this writing shortly after 10 p.m. ET Wednesday, had almost 9,900 followers.

Credit : USA Today