Tuesday Evening Thread: Two Weeks Later….

Posted at 03:16 PM ET, 11/20/2012

Here’s a thought. Why don’t we make voting easy?

By Jonathan Bernstein

Of course: Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is reacting to Democratic electoral victories by trying to make it harder for people to vote. He wants to end same-day voter registration.

Same-day voter registration is, in fact, a bad policy — because registration should be automatic. But in the current situation it’s the least-bad of bad policies. That’s because everything about voter registration in this country is awful. We should have universal, automatic voter registration. Period. End of story. Just as most democracies do.

Having an extra burden on voters to get themselves registered (and, given how often Americans move, re-registered and re-registered again) is a bad idea. Granted, automatic voter registration for all would take federal government action, and there’s not much chance the the Republican House of Representatives will agree to anything like that any time soon. Still, it would be good to see some real movement on this in Congress, even if passage is unlikely this time around.

That’s not the only reform Congress could adopt. Senator Chris Coons has drafted promising reform legislation. Among his ideas: Giving federal grants to states that develop plans to make it easy to vote through streamlined registration, early voting, better training of election officials and other fixes. Separately, as Greg noted here recently, the Brennan Center for Justice has suggested a long set of reforms that would especially help alleviate election day problems.

Look: either you believe in democracy, or you don’t. If you do, you should be trying to make it easier for people to vote. Full stop. American elections administration right now is an embarrassment, but it’s actually a fairly easy problem to fix. Even if Democrats can’t do that alone, at the very least they should be fighting for better procedures. In the process, they would be making it clear that one side supports well-administered, high-participation elections — while the other side wants to select which voters will participate, with the goal of designing an electorate that suits its political needs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/heres-a-thought-why-dont-we-make-voting-easy/2012/11/20/3751c7c0-334b-11e2-92f0-496af208bf23_blog.html

Jim Messina: Jeep ad was Romney’s biggest mistake

Posted by Rachel Weiner on November 20, 2012 at 9:25 am

President Obama’s campaign manager said Tuesday that an ad suggesting Jeep was moving production to China was the biggest mistake made by Mitt Romney’s campaign.

“They ended up spending the last 14 days of the election in the Midwest on the defense,” Messina said at a Politico Playbook breakfast. The ad was criticized by factcheckers and by major car companies.

Messina said that one of the best decisions made by the Obama campaign was to hire non-political tech staff — advice he got from Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

If you asked Harper Reed, the campaign’s chief technology officer, what the campaign did, Messina said, he would say, ”They just built a whole bunch of things to make door knocking easier.”

Some of those tools — in particular, the social Dashboard — will be used to pressure lawmakers on a fiscal cliff deal, Messina suggested.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/11/20/jim-messina-jeep-ad-was-romneys-biggest-mistake/?tid=pm_politics_pop

Rachel Maddow Smacks Down John McCain, ‘You need to know what you’re talking about’

By: Sarah JonesNovember 20th, 2012

Rachel Maddow smacked down the defacto foreign policy leader of the Republican Party, Republican Senator John McCain, for being both wrong and incompetent on foreign policy.

After playing a Chris Hayes montage of McCain getting it wrong repeatedly entitled “Arm the Rebels”, Maddow delivered the final blow, “(E)ven if you’re just the opposition, you need to know what you’re talking about. You need to have a basic level of competence. And doing what John McCain says is not a reasonable substitution for basic competence on this subject.”

Noting that the Republican Party still hasn’t admitted they got Iraq wrong, and that they ran Mitt Romney who has zero foreign policy experience, Rachel Maddow sees Republicans as allowing McCain to be their voice for foreign policy. This is a problem for the country since he is so often completely wrong on the subject.

Maddow ended her dedication to McCain’s incompetence with this brutal smack down, “There is a basic level of interest and competence required even of the opposition party on the subject, even if the country has decided they don’t want to put you back in the White House, not after what George W Bush did with it. Even if you’re just in congress, even if you’re just the opposition, you need to know what you’re talking about. You need to have a basic level of competence. And doing what John McCain says is not a reasonable substitution for basic competence on this subject.”

http://www.politicususa.com/rachel-maddow-smacks-john-mccain-you-youre-talking-about.html

Good Evening Sepia/POU FAM♥. ***BIG HUG(*** :>)

– - – - -***fist bump*** – - –OF COURSE IMMA JOIN MY POU fAM – -IN THIS – - -2 WEEK CELEBRATION!!. – –Woo! Hoo! – - -

Annnd a FEW ACCOMPLISHMENTS: — -Woo! Hoo!

– –☻ — -West Wing Week: 11/09/12 or “Our Journey Forward”

– –☻ – - -West Wing Week: 11/16/12 or “That’s Who We Are” – –

– –☻ — Obama departs on four-country Asian tour — -2 MAKE HISTORY! :>)