CLINTON JUST ISN'T A GOOD CAMPAIGNER

In 2008, she lost Texas to Obama because she put almost no effort into the caucuses and this year, she didn't win Michigan and Wisconsin because she didn't spend enough time:

Pundits also criticize Clinton for not visiting Wisconsin once during the general election, and paying attention to Michigan only late in the campaign. Trump was the first Republican to win Wisconsin since 1984, and the first to win Michigan since 1988.

2016 ELECTION NOTES

- The tens of millions spent by non-conservative groups on polling were all pretty much wasted.

- The pundits and elections specialists who wrote Trump off 10-14 days ago should  be required to publicly account for their errors, as Nate Silver did yesterday.

- A big problem with the future Trump Administration is the lack of competent people. I even heard one pundit suggest John Bolton as Secretary of State

- Even with bigotry tolerated at the top of the ticket, a nationally known bigot lost in a red state.

CONSERVATIVE PUNDIT IN DENIAL

We liberals used to mock conservative pundits because they never admit that conservatism failed and Trump has provided another instance of this denial:

The Failure Of American Institutions, Not Of Conservatism, Made Donald Trump Possible
By Ben Domenech
October 25, 2016

After decades of spewing bullshit in the media, it was inevitable that a bullshit artist would one day be the GOP's presidential candidate.

A LITTLE MORE BAD NEWS FOR HANNITY, ET. AL.

I'd really like to know what Hannity's response is:

Ex-CIA director says ‘Fox News has jumped the shark’ and abandoned ‘conservatism’
By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Monday, October 24, 2016

George W. Bush’s former director of the NSA and the CIA likened Fox News’ Sean Hannity to a Soviet-era apparatchik over the weekend.

“Hannity has entered the pantheon of a true propagandist,” Mr. Hayden continued. And his behavior reminds me of a conversation I had with a political office in the mid-1980s when I was an air attaché to Bulgaria. I asked this officer what truth was to him. He responded without hesitation, ‘Truth is what serves the party.’ And there you have it.”

Others have also noted that the Noise Machine is full of shit:

"When I was watching the president, I was struck by how he seemed to understand the problems with conservative media more than any Republican does," said John Ziegler, a nationally syndicated conservative radio host and columnist for Mediaite.
[]
"Drudge, Breitbart, Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, [Laura] Ingraham — those people are completely invested in another false narrative to cover up the first false narrative," he said, adding, "and if there's one thing I have ever learned in life, it is far easier to dupe people than to convince them that they have been duped."

I WAS IN A GOOD MOOD AFTER THE CUBS' WIN...

so I figured I could handle listening to Mark "Foamer" Levin for a bit.  I learned that many of his callers want to either form their own party or purge RINOs like Speaker Ryan from the GOP.   This may be the beginning of the end for the GOP.

HEADS I LOSE, TAILS I LOSE

That's the position 5,300 peasants were at Wells Fargo.  Any one of them could be fired for not doing enough fraudulent cross-selling OR for notifying the "ethics" department.  In the latter case, Wells Fargo retaliated against internal whistleblowers:

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.

"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

"I endured harsh bullying ... defamation of character, and eventually being pinned for something I didn't do," said Heather Brock, who was fired earlier this month as a senior business banker at a Wells Fargo branch in Round Rock, Texas.

FEEL GOOD NEWS

(h/t Atrios)

I've been reading about the problems at Glenn Beck's media empire for over a year and now it seems it's on the verge of collapse unless he can figure out a Trump-like bankruptcy.

I FOUND ONE!

A few years ago, I spent about 6 months looking for a conservative thinker who wasn't basically a crackpot. Aside from Russell Kirk, I came up empty. There are occasional outbursts of sanity from Ponnuru and a few others but until now, I was unaware of any current Amrican conservative who was consistently sane. My new hero until further notice is Samuel Goldman. He makes obviously good points, such as:

I think the great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives.

and

A lot of conservatives — not so much political professionals who spend their time studying the numbers, but rank-and-file Republicans and voters — really seemed to believe that they are a silent majority. In some ways, this election could be described as the story of a minority that thinks it's a majority.

The latter delusion is heavily promoted by talk radio gasbags like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and Levin.

Goldman also isn't impressed with Austrian economics:

It’s hard to say what would have happened if the administration had failed to secure the stimulus and funds to insure international liquidity in 2009 and 2010. But the bottom did not fall out of the economy. The administration deserves credit for this.

Tough as things are, the U.S. economy is also doing better than other countries’. That’s partly due to the energy boom, which is sheer luck. But Obama’s opposition to the kind of austerity policies that are causing so much pain in Europe also has something to do with it.