In addition to winning in the cities, US Rep Jim Himes also beat Republican Steve Obsitnik in Shelton, Ridgefield, Trumbull, Monroe, Westport, Weston and Fairfield
Archive for November 6th, 2012
Political pundits offer their views about election
Bill O’Reilly, Mike Buckabee, Al Gore and Chris Matthews all had scathing statements about the election and the process of casting votes.
O’Reilly didn’t mince words on Fox News when he said the demographics of the country have changed and are no longer in line with “traditional America anymore.”
“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff … People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”
O’Reilly’s comment mirrors controversial comments by Mitt Romney about 47 percent who “believe that they are victims.” Romney was able to rebound from those comments to gain momentum in the final weeks of his campaign.
Minutes after O’Reilly’s comments, Huckabee said the Republican party had done a poor job of “reaching out to people of color.”
“That’s something we’ve got to work on,” he said on Fox News. “It’s a group of people that frankly should be with us based on the real policy of conservatism.”
While O’Reilly and Huckabee commented on the vote, Matthews and Gore added their opinions on the voting process.
Gore criticized voting laws, calling them “un-American” and a “disgrace” on Current TV.
“It is a strategy that is a direct descendent of the racist Jim Crow tactics that were used in the wake of the Civil War to prevent black people from voting,” Gore said. “It’s more sophisticated now, it’s dressed up in different kinds of language, but it is un-American.”
Matthews, who anchors for MSNBC, said the U.S. was beginning to act “like a Third World country” in regards to early voting laws.
“What’s going on in our country?” Matthews said. “We begin to act like a Third World country – and I mean no disrespect to Third World countries here – when we start having elections you can’t trust because they keep changing the game and the rule.”
NBC, Fox News call election for Obama
NBC News has called the 2012 presidential election for President Obama. So has Fox News.
After both networks called Ohio for Obama, they brought the gavel down on 2012. Virginia, Nevada and Florida were still to be called, according to Fox, but Mitt Romney’s last path to 270 electoral votes was gone.
Lead Fox anchor Chris Wallace, however, soon went on-air to say Fox may have made a too-early call: “The Romney camp has real doubts about the call made by us.”
Top Republican strategist Karl Rove said, “This is premature.”
Then, in a bit of Must See TV, then Fox gets the jitters. Anchor Megyn Kelly was dispatched a couple floors away — or somewhere — LIVE to interview Fox’s own “Decision Desk” – the network’s own in-house numbers crunchers.
“We are quite comfortable” with our call on Ohio, The Desk told Kelly. And they didn’t back down from Rove.
Now THIS is compelling live TV.
Michigan man votes after being revived at the polls
Apparently, the dead can vote.
According to the Detroit News, Ty Houston helped revive a man who suffered a medical condition while filling out his absentee ballot on Monday afternoon with his wife.
The elderly man, who was not identified, was not breathing and had no heartbeat, but Houston, a registered nurse, performed CPR on the man until he regained consciousness, according to the newspaper.
Once he was revived, the man asked a simple question.
“The first question he asked was ‘Did I vote?’” Houston told the newspaper.
The man, who had a tracheotomy in his throat, took a few more breathes and told his wife that there are only two things that are important to him: “That I love you and that I finished what I came here to do…vote.”
The man was expected to recover.
Houston told CBS that the man’s words should serve as a reminder to fellow Americans that pass on their right to vote.
LGBT milestone: Tammy Baldwin first openly gay U.S. senator
In what could be the first of what could be several LGBT milestones tonight, Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-WI, is projected to be the first openly lesbian U.S. senator.
She did it by defeating Tommy Thompson, the former four-term Wisconsin GOP governor and former George W. Bush cabinet member who is immensely popular in the Badger State.
Neither Baldwin nor Thompson made her sexual orientation an issue in the campaign. But as Baldwin, a seven-term congresswoman, told The Guardian recently:
“If you are not in the room, the conversation is about you,” she said. “If you are in the room, the conversation is with you. We never had an openly LGBT member of the U.S. Senate, and even though there are strong pro-equality allies who serve there, it has always been a conversation about a group of people. So this changes everything.”
As for the same-sex marriage measures on the ballot in Maryland, Maine and Washington state, they’re so close that the results may not be known tonight.
True the Vote’s impact said to be negligible
Catherine Engelbrecht, center, leader of True The Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud, in Worthington, Ohio, Aug. 25, 2012. Busloads of illegal voters, cited by voter fraud groups like True The Vote, have yet to be seen. (Handout photo)
By Dan Freedman and Joe Holley
Civil rights lawyers on Tuesday said the national poll-watching effort of Houston-based True the Vote had fizzled even as the organization’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said it was still responding to a deluge of complaints.
Engelbrecht had predicted the group and its affiliates would field a million poll watchers to ferret out what Engelbrecht described as a tidal wave of voter fraud that could alter election results in key states.
But her opponents charged the group was little more than a thinly veiled effort by conservatives to intimidate voters, many of them minorities, and depress the vote for Democratic candidates.
In that regard, civil rights lawyers said, their efforts failed.
“I think voter determination is so strong out there that (TTV hasn’t) had the impact they desired,’’ said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, one of several organizations. It’s good for our nation to know we don’t allow an un-hooded Klan in 2012.’’
In a statement, Engelbrecht responded: “Arnwine and company should join True the Vote in the 21st Century _ they’d certainly save money. In the meantime, they’re punching in the dark.’’
The Lawyers’ Committee and other civil rights groups joining in an umbrella organization, the Election Protection Coalition, recorded over 70,000 complaints to its emergency number of long lines, voters finding their names inexplicably stripped from rolls at their usual polling places, and poll workers asking voters for IDs even though judges had ruled they weren’t necessary to vote.
But complaints concerning True the Vote were relatively few, officials of the coalition said.
Eric Marshall, also with the Lawyers’ Committee, said perhaps True the Vote “wasn’t as strong as it claimed to be. They haven’t had the effect that many thought they’d have on this election.’’
Engelbrecht, however, insisted in a statement that True the Vote had been inundated with calls to its Election Integrity Hotline. The group spent Tuesday “sifting through hundreds of logged complaints from poll watchers and concerned citizens that will require exhaustive due diligence prior to referring to authorities.’’
She described the polling place irregularities reported by watchers as ranging from “the mundane procedural hiccups to clear violations of various federal election laws.”
True the Vote is “exercising as much caution as possible before submitting complaints to election officials off the hotline,” said spokesman Logan Churchwell.
Churchwell praised Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart for his “quick action” after a True the Vote volunteer accused members of the NAACP of taking over a Houston polling place last week and electioneering on behalf of President Obama.
Stanart promised to investigate allegations of trespassing beyond marked boundaries at the polls.
The dispute began when Eve Rockford, a True the Vote-trained poll watcher, accused the NAACP of taking over the Harris County Precinct 139 polling location at 6719 W. Montgomery Road in the Acres Homes community.
In a written statement, Rockford said that NAACP officials handed out bottled water to early voters standing in line, hand-picked people to move to the front of the line and were “stirring up the crowd” to vote for Obama.
NAACP officials said they did not break any laws by assisting elderly and disabled voters “by standing in line for them or asking younger people to let the elderly and disabled go ahead of them in the line to vote,” according to a statement released by the NAACP.
Churchwell said the group had not experienced any “direct problems with NAACP today.”
Elsewhere, Tea Party advocates affiliated with True the Vote in Columbus, Ohio, were accused of fraudulently using signatures of candidates in applications to local election officials to have themselves certified as poll watchers.
One judicial candidate, Terri Jamison, said in a letter to Franklin County, Ohio, election officials that posted on a political website, plunderbund.com, that the True the Vote activists had described themselves to her as a “bi-partisan group’’ that wanted to “observe the vote count.’’
Jamison said that had she “known the real intentions of this group, there is no way that I would have signed to give True the Vote permission to be a vote observer.’’
The Franklin County Board of Elections barred True the Vote’s representatives from poll watching in Columbus, capital of a key battleground state.
Engelbrecht accused the Ohio Democratic Party of pressuring election officials and candidates into rejecting True the Vote poll watchers. She hinted at legal action.
“The Ohio Democratic Party has projected paranoia on an international scale by promoting the idea that concerned citizens would dare observe elections to ensure a fair process,’’ Engelbrecht said in a statement. “If the Ohio Democratic Party thinks True the Vote-trained poll watchers are legion, wait until it meets our lawyers.’’
Who’s watching what in Stamford?
Republicans at Stamford's GOP Headquarters are watching FOX News for presidential election updates. Maggie Gordon/STAMFORD ADVOCATE
Most of the numbers are in for the local races, indicating who the new school board members, state representatives and senators will be. But the presidential election could last all night, and is commanding the attention of the politically enthusiastic at Stamford’s political headquarters.
I’m sitting at the GOP Headquarters on East Main Street, were volunteers have been tallying results for the past two hours while others have pulled up chairs or rested elbows to watch the presidential campaign unfold. Here, they’re checking out Fox News. At Stamford’s Democratic Headquarters, the outlet of choice in MSNBC.
No surprises there, at least.
