Polling suggests that the Latino problem for the GOP is deeper than immigration. ... Just 12 percent of Latinos support a cuts-only approach to deficit reduction, and only 25 percent want to repeal Obamacare. Only 31 percent of Hispanics say they’d be more likely to vote for a Republican who supports the DREAM Act. This isn’t to say Latinos aren’t eager to see immigration reform, it’s just that the lion’s share have bigger reasons for rejecting the GOP.

[P]erhaps the most telling exit poll result about Hispanics is the almost identical thumping Romney took with Asian and Jewish voters, and even more so with black voters. ... As Tom Scocca wrote last week, all kinds of people vote Democratic, and it’s the Republicans who rely on a narrow ethnic niche to win. The real issue isn’t Democrats courting minority “special interests” (indeed, as an economic matter Latin American immigration is good for everyone except Americans who primarily speak Spanish), it’s Republicans who use targeted outreach to help boost their share of the white vote despite a generally unpersuasive message. Viewed in that light, the anti-Sotomayor demagoguery becomes far more comprehensible. Far from an unforced error, it’s part of a reasonably effective strategy to ensure the loyalty of white voters without altering an economic agenda that’s relentlessly biased toward the rich.

“I bring quadruple diversity to the Senate,” Hirono said at a rally earlier in the campaign. “I’m a woman. I’ll be the first Asian woman ever to be elected to the U.S. Senate. I am an immigrant. I am a Buddhist. When I said this at one of my gatherings, they said, ‘Yes, but are you gay?’ and I said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”

rivkat

Results ask Nate Silver if they're significant. #natesilverfacts

— Patrick Mohr (@Socalledchaos) November 8, 2012

Nate Silver's samples have only a median and a mode. Because no number would be mean to Nate Silver. #natesilverfacts

— Andrés Moreira (@dilefante) November 7, 2012

#NateSilverFacts The last line of the Mayan Calendar just says, "And Nate Silver can take it from here..."

— Myrlin A. Hermes (@MyrlinAHermes) November 8, 2012

If you say Nate Silver's name three times before flipping a coin, it will land on heads 50% of the time. #natesilverfacts

— Peter (@perisaccadic) November 8, 2012

In Asgard, Thor's hammer is referred to as "Nate Silver."#natesilverfacts

— clint benjamin (@superclyde23) November 8, 2012

Nate Silver can recite pi. Backwards #NateSilverFacts

— (:≡≡◦○◦○οºO (@sprawld) November 8, 2012

Wikipedia asked Nate Silver to stop adding Dates of Death to entries for people who haven't died yet. #NateSilverFacts

— Noah Smith (@smithnoah) November 8, 2012

I don't know what I'm having for lunch today. But Nate Silver does. #natesilverfacts

— Shane Johns (@OttawaShane) November 8, 2012

Nate Silver expected the Spanish Inquisition. #NateSilverFacts

— Dominik Kaeser (@dpkay) November 8, 2012

Nate Silver knows there’s no such thing as #natesilverfacts only #natesilverconfidencelevels

— Jim Ray (@jimray) November 7, 2012

An expansive onslaught of negative political advertisements in Congressional races has left many incumbents, including some Republicans long opposed to restrictions on campaign spending, concluding that legislative measures may be in order to curtail the power of the outside groups behind most of the attacks.

While Democrats have long denounced a 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the gates on unlimited spending on advertisements, some Republicans are now growing more disenchanted with the system that allowed the barrage of ads, often by shadowy groups, and the effects it has had on what they see as a sullen and disenchanted electorate.

“Once we get back, those that do get re-elected will all be commiserating about all the negative ads,” said Representative Joe Heck of Nevada, a Republican who faced ads accusing him of voting against a rape crisis center and against money to help victims of domestic violence, among other things. “And that will start the groundswell for reform.”

The 2010 Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was expected to be an unalloyed advantage to Republicans, who have a deeper bench of rich individuals and corporations willing to finance candidates.

The decision has appeared to benefit Republicans over all this election cycle, as Republican money has poured into the presidential contest. Democrats say their third-party allies have also been outspent, by about two to one, in Senate campaigns. But the impact of Citizens United has come with complications, with some Republican incumbents in the House at a disadvantage.

Earlier this month, before Republicans surged ahead with an additional $25 million, the total spending and reservations for ad time in the House campaigns has been dead even at $89 million, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Conservative donors were confident that the House Republican majority was secure and sent their money elsewhere. Democratic donors, including unions and environmental groups like the League of Conservation Voters, have been more strategic, concentrating their fire on a handful of vulnerable House Republicans.

Mr. Lungren said the attacks on him began just months after the 2010 election, with radio advertisements and automated phone calls. They have accelerated into an onslaught of television commercials in what has become the most expensive House race in the country....

He said the 2012 experience could be transformative for other Republicans who have spent the last six months enduring the grim piano music and disconsolate faces of “voters” in negative ad after ad, sometimes against them, sometimes on their behalf but always without their signoff. “We had to see how this worked out for a cycle,” he said.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who runs the group charged with electing Republicans to the Senate, has said he thinks it would be worthwhile to examine the campaign-finance system after the election.

Ha ha. We’re in the stretch aren’t we? Look at those clouds. It’s beautiful. Look at those things.

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

Is #soros cash behind #ows protests? We took a look and here's what we found http://t.co/v5rto1FY @michellenichols @reuters #occupywallst

1. Soros’ Open Society gave money to The Tides Center.

2. The Tides Center, a San Francisco-based quasi-clearinghouse for other nonprofit donations, gave money to AdBusters Magazine.

3. AdBusters—an anti-corporate Canadian magazine teenagers read when they’re 16 and listening to lots of Rage Against the Machine and dreaming of protesting globalization before they spend four years at Colgate, afterwards, ending up with a job at Wieden+Kennedy or something—made a poster suggesting people Occupy Wall Street.

4. AdBusters becomes relevant for the first time in, like, seven years when people actually Occupied Wall Street.

5. Reuters quotes Soros regarding Occupy Wall Street, context aside, as saying “I can understand their sentiment.”

6. Conclusion: George Soros is behind Occupy Wall Street.

7. Boom: Drudge Link.

Soros funds the organization Open Society, which between 2007 and 2009 gave $3.5 million to a group called the Tides Center, a clearinghouse for liberal donors that distributes grants of more than $100 million each year. The Tides Center gave $185,000 between 2001 and 2010 to Adbusters — the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist organization that helped conceive of Occupy Wall Street — and $26,000 of that came between 2007 and 2009.

So, to sum up, years before the Occupy Wall Street protests were even a gleam in anyone's eye, a trickle of Soros's money went to one of the groups involved. Compared to the Koch brothers and their well-documented financial ties to the tea party, it is very nearly a rounding error.

The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal: “This is how you do a hit piece on a distributed movement. Invent a leader with a Limbaugh quote and then attack him and the fictional mob he’s hired. Wow.”

The Awl: “A+ Traffic-Trolling.”

New York's Noreen Malone: “This story might not be out of place on Fox News, but at Reuters, which has always taken pains to stay above the partisan fray, it smells suspiciously like Drudge bait.”

Max Read of Gawker: “which is better drudge bait, ‘SOROS BEHIND TK‘ or ‘MICHELLE OBAMA EATS FRIED TK’”

New York Times reporter and The Lede blogger J. David Goodman: “Turns up little besides a shaky connection.”

Reuters columnist and social media shaman Anthony DeRosa: “I’d sum up my personal feelings on the article as: that’s not @Reuters journalism.”

Reuters’ own financial columnist Felix Salmon: “I think it’s ridiculous.”

Notorious NYU journalism wonk Jay Rosen: “Seriously, Reuters? This is pathetic…I don’t see everything they run. But I do respect their operation. And I’ve never seen anything that lame from Reuters.”

Executive editor of Thomson Reuters Digital Jim Impoco, following Jay Rosen’s comments: “That is putting it kindly.”

Salon’s Justin Elliot: “Is Kevin Bacon the force behind Occupy Wall Street? It’s irresponsible not to ask.”

Soros: not a funder of Wall Street protests