As the 2012 election approached, Republican governors and legislators in battleground states across the country rushed to enact restrictive Voter ID laws, to eliminate election-day registration and to limit early voting. Those were just some of the initiatives that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People identified as “an onslaught of restrictive measures across the country designed to stem electoral strength among communities of color.”

Why did so much energy go into the effort?

John Payton, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, explained, “These block the vote efforts are a carefully targeted response to the remarkable growth of the minority electorate, and threaten to disproportionally diminish the voting strength of African-Americans and Latinos.”

Civil rights groups pushed back, working with the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and other organizations to mount legal and legislative challenges. But the most dramatic pushback may well have been the determined voter registration and mobilization drives organized on the ground in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other battleground states.

via How Voter Backlash Against Voter Suppression Is Changing Our Politics | The Nation.

There’s nothing easier than criticizing a guy who’s just lost the presidency, so before parsing Mitt Romney’s interview with Fox News Sunday, let me offer a few words of praise. There’s little question that Romney is personally decent. Like Barack Obama, but unlike many other leading politicians, Romney seems genuinely happier being with his wife and family than being in a room of political sycophants. In his Fox interview, he gave the impression of a man stomaching political defeat comparatively well, because, in Ann Romney’s words, “fortunately we like each other.” Romney’s decent, wholesome image was not enough to win him the presidency, but it dealt a blow to America’s hoary bigotry against Mormons, which is no small achievement.

Watch the highlights of Mitt Romney’s interview with ‘Fox News Sunday.’

But for all his rectitude and good humor, Romney still came across as a man who doesn’t understand why he lost. He claimed that as president he would have prevented the sequester, because as governor of Massachusetts he learned the art of bipartisan compromise. “You know, when I was elected governor of my state, I had a legislature 87 percent Democrat,” he told Chris Wallace. “It was not lost on me that to get anything done, I couldn’t be attacking them. I had to find ways to reach out to them.”

via Fox News Interview Shows Mitt Romney Still Doesn’t Get Why He Lost – The Daily Beast.

Thank whatever deity you pray to, or none at all, that these wretched people are nowhere near the White House.

In their first interview since the Great Shellshocking of 2012, Mitt and Ann allow Chris Wallace into one of their many homes so they can wax philosophical about the defeat everyone outside of their delusional bubble knew was coming, and Ann takes this opportunity to assure us that yes, she’s still quite disappointed in you people for not seizing the great opportunity to let her husband regularly insult you from the Oval Office.

via Daily Kos: Romneys give Fox 'News' interview to remind us why we're all glad they're not in the White House.

GOP failed to fulfill its prime directive: advancing the interests of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. It spent much of the year constructing an alternative reality that left millions of its flock in shock when President Obama won an overwhelming reelection. It refused to accept the facts on the ground and denigrated polls (even its own) when the results conflicted with the fictional narrative it was peddling. And perhaps most painful of all, Fox surrendered its ratings lead to MSNBC. Two-thirds of its primetime lineup (Hannity and Van Susteren) dropped to second place behind the competition on MSNBC (Maddow and O’Donnell). However, Fox’s travails did not occur for lack of effort. It was clearly operating at the top of its capacity to distort and deceive. In the process it unleashed some of the most feverishly biased reporting, even for Fox News. What follows are a few of the worst departures from ethical journalism by Fox in the last year.

via 12 Unbelievably Awful Things Fox News Did This Year | Alternet.

The National Memo » The GOP Didn’t Steal The 2012 Election, But They Sure Tried.

As 2012 draws to a close, let’s take a mo­ment and pay tri­bute to some of the most eg­regi­ous, most in­sane­ly idiotic, downright stupid and most em­bar­rass­ing peo­ple who have in­flic­ted them­selves on the American psyc­he. The field was large but I think this group cap­tures the ess­ence of what it means to be a card car­ry­ing mem­b­er of the Tin Foil Hat Brigade. In no par­ticular order they are:

via Ten Of The Most Embarrassing People Of The Year | Liberals Unite.