Drudge and others in the conservative media have been commenting for days on the failure of FEMA to help citizens in areas afflicted by Hurricane Sandy. And almost no one seemed to notice. Now that’s beginning to change. Wonder why that is.

UPDATE:  Yahoo!  also reports (last headline below):

UP-UPDATE:  And Yahoo! is paying even more attention:

Given the “economic headwinds the president faced,” Jay Cost writes today in the Weekly Standard, his campaign team . . .

. . .played to its base with a level of intensity rarely seen in the modern era. “The war on women” was a prime case in point. The idea was to maximize turnout for the president’s core groups by focusing on identity politics, encouraging them to come out and vote against a fictitious GOP bogeyman who would suppress their rights to vote, deport their friends and neighbors, deny them Medicare, ship their jobs overseas, raid their pensions, and eliminate their access to contraception. And it worked.

Emphasis added.  Indeed, as Guy Benson put it, Mitt Romney

. . . was defeated by a small, petty, and overwhelmingly negative opponent whose turnout machine swamped all else.  The unserious and unseemly drumbeat of birth control, Big Bird, binders, and Blame Bush worked.  The “Kill Romney” strategy laid the groundwork for this successful approach.  The president offered no meaningful or sweeping vision for a second term, but it didn’t matter.  What an awful precedent.

And the end of the campaign, when Mitt Romney seemed so confident and Obama so angry, I myself became increasingly confident that he would win.  He just looked like a winner.  I had thought Obama’s nastiness would backfire.  People don’t want a president who engages in such kind of petty attacks.

It looks like I was wrong.

That’s one of the things which makes our defeat this week so troubling. The challenger had the more upbeat message and lost.  The incumbent instead misrepresented his opponent’s record and attacked his background.

He won by demonizing.  And that is just not a pleasant thought.

By historical standards, the current economic recovery has been the slowest since the Great Depression. And yet, thanks in large part to how the legacy media spun the recent jobs numbers, Americans have greater economic confidence this month than they did a year ago.

And yet, CNBC reports today, the U.S. Economy may be headed for another recession. “Funny,” quipped Glenn Reynolds linking the piece, “just a few days ago CNBC was full of good news!”

Things right now, to be sure, are marginally better than they were four years ago.  And that certainly did not hurt the president.  But, given the regulations his administration has signed off on and the coming implementation of Obamacare, we have only seen the first fruits of his policies.

Maybe we have to see their full impact before people realize just how damaging Obama’s policies are to the economy.  Just hearing a pundit forecast what they mean is not enough.  ”Sometimes”, wrote Amartel commenting at Ann Althouse’s blog,

. . . knowledge has to be obtained empirically. It’s going to hurt like hell, and the people who suffer the most are going to be the people who voted for it. My chief hope for the coming months and years is that mainstream media will finally be held to account.

Never give up, never give in. Not to the takers’ agenda, nor to their baroque and embarrassing emotional excesses, intellectual bankruptcy and divisive impulses.

H/t Reader Kurt.  Yes, it is going to hurt like hell.  And let us hope that people hold the media to account as well.  They have covered for this administration’s failed economic policies.  They spun mediocre economic numbers as a sign of robust recovery, numbers similar to those in 2004 which were the sign of a sluggish economy.

I’ve sequestered myself from news (and I miss Bret Baier already) since about 2200L Tuesday night, so please forgive me if I’m not breaking new ground here. If I’m not, and this happens, I may end up looking pretty damned prescient come 2016:

Given that there’s bound to be some nervousness (it existed before the election even) among Democrats that there isn’t any “bench” of candidates to take the helm after President Obama leaves office in 2017 (Biden-no, Reid-no, Pelosi-no, Clinton—you gotta say likely no), and

Given that he did so much to aggravate Republicans by what many saw as going beyond the customary magnanimous gratitude during a crisis and instead displayed what they considered way-overboard fawning obsequiousness toward the president on the eve of a national election, Chris Christie isn’t in any position to win a Republican primary…

Would it surprise anybody if he switched parties (likely before his re-election campaign for New Jersey Governor next year)? He’d pretty instantly become the heir-apparent to Obama, wouldn’t you think?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HHQ)

*ps, Yes, I know…I was the guy who said he was going to turn a new leaf when it comes to politics and ideas. This shouldn’t be misconstrued as a divergence from that approach…just a theoretical academic exercise.

UPDATE: Aw, crap. I should really Google before I post. Well, great minds…

Tuesday night may have represented a defeat for America’s more conservative political party at the federal level, but the American people did not repudiate conservative ideals.

Although Republicans lost seats in the United States Senate and House, they did relatively well in state legislative races. Indeed, “Even as Midwesterners voted to reelect Obama,” wrote James Sherk yesterday in the National Review,

they also voted against the union-backed candidates. Michigan voters rejected making collective-bargaining powers a “right” by a 58–42 margin. Michigan Republicans also held onto their majorities in the legislature. In Wisconsin, Republicans aligned with Governor Walker’s agenda retook the state senate. Republicans expanded their margins in Indiana to better than two-thirds of the legislature. Ohio Republicans also expanded their legislative majority.

They did suffer some losses, losing, for example, the House in Colorado and New Hampshire and losing both chambers in Maine as well as Minnesota, but, in addition to Wisconsin, Republicans flipped the Senate in Alaska and, for the first time since Reconstruction, won both chambers of the Arkansas legislature.

Mitt Romney may have lost Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but Republicans control the legislature (both houses) and hold the governor’s chair in all five states.

Not just that, Tom Maguire teased out an interesting data point buried in The New York Times report on the exit polls:

In November 2008, when the country was floundering in the worst recession since the Depression, Election Day surveys of voters found that 51 percent of them wanted government to do more to intervene while 43 percent said it was doing too many things better left to businesses. Now, after four years of government activism, those numbers have flipped.

This corresponds with other surveys showing that Americans prefer a smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services. (more…)