Karl Rove boasted on the eve of Tuesday’s election that all signs pointed towards an electoral college landslide. He was right about the result, just wrong about the candidate. And now it’s up to Rove to explain to donors why, after blowing through $300 million of their money, President Obama is still President Obama and Harry Reid still runs the Senate.

Judging by Rove’s election night tantrum on Fox News, this was not a situation he was well prepared for. In a surreal stretch of television, he refused to believe the network’s call of Ohio, lashed out at producers for making it, then spouted a blizzard of county by county statistics to justify his increasingly untenable case.

“Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?” Fox host Megyn Kelly asked at one point, “Or is this real?”...

...Two days later, Rove started the hard work of explaining why the Democrats were simply too much for any one billionaire-funded super PAC to handle...

According to one Tea Party leader, the reason for Mitt Romney’s loss to President Barack Obama is that he was not conservative enough and was “weak-kneed” and a throwback to Bob Dole and John McCain...

In a press statement, entitled “Tea Party Vows "No Retreat" and a subtitle “Promise to search out candidates with clear conservative records; no more Dole-McCain-Romney nominees”, the group leaders said the following:

A group Leaders of the Tea Party News Network (TPNN) and TheTeaParty.net offered an unflinching assessment of Election Day results. Todd Cefaratti, editor of the Tea Party News Network said, "We're disappointed in Governor Romney's loss. But this goes to the heart of what we have been saying all along. Bob Dole didn't win. John McCain didn't win. And now Mitt Romney hasn't won. The lesson the GOP and Americans need to learn is that weak-kneed Republicans do not get elected. Conservatives do."

"The Tea Party has not yet begun to fight. It's time for a wholesale reassessment of the D.C. establishment politicians and party grandees who have no commitment or courage to reduce the size of government. We now have another four years ahead of us with Barack Obama leading the charge against liberty," TPNN News Director Scottie Hughes said. "There were some bright spots tonight from Ted Cruz to Jeff Flake, to a decisive win in the U.S. House where Tea Partiers have a mandate to stand against Obama's big government second-term agenda. "...

Man, these guys just don't get it! Do they really think that their version of a hard right candidate could win the Hispanic, Black, Asian, woman, LGBT vote et al?

..Or do they really think that there are enough angry white males out there to put them over the top?

Karl Rove was incredulous. His colleagues at the Fox News decision desk had called Ohio for President Obama, a move he insisted just a few minutes earlier would be premature.

“We’ve got to be careful about calling this when we have 991 votes separating the candidates,” he scolded them. “I’d be very cautious about intruding into this process.”...

... And so ensued the most bizarre on-air encounter of election night: a network anchor interrogating Arnon Mishkin, a member of the Fox News decision team and a respected voting analyst, forcing him and a colleague to defend their news judgment against Mr. Rove, one of the most powerful Republican fund-raisers and strategists.

However odd, the exchange perfectly captured one of the persistent sources of strain between the media and Republicans throughout the presidential campaign. Ever skeptical of a media bias toward Democrats, conservatives complained repeatedly that polls this year were showing an erroneous and biased edge for Mr. Obama....

An advocacy group on Friday filed a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint alleging that Walmart heir Jim Walton violated campaign finance laws by contributing more than the individual legal maximum to candidates during the 2008 election cycle. Walton is the seventh-wealthiest person in America, according to Forbes.

The complaint was filed by Our Walmart, a group affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. Our Walmart discovered the evidence while reviewing Walton's 2012 political donations, according to a spokesman for the campaign Making Change at Walmart, which is also affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

Walton is chairman and CEO of the Arkansas-based Arvest Bank Group, Inc., which owns 16 locally managed banks with various branches in communities throughout the Midwest. Walton does not work directly for Walmart, but as the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, he is an heir to one of the country's greatest retail fortunes and has a net worth estimated at $26.8 billion, according to Forbes.

Read the entire complaint here (refresh page if it fails to load)...

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/02/jim-walton-walmart-heir-campaign-finance-violations_n_2064460.html

Thousands of Wells Fargo & Co. home loan customers recently received a surprise in the mail: refund checks from the big bank, along with letters saying they had paid unnecessary fees for their mortgages.

The unsolicited offers of thousands of dollars arrived with a catch — if the borrowers cash the checks, they can't later sue the No. 1 U.S. home lender. The San Francisco bank said in the letters that borrowers were put into more expensive loans when they could have qualified for cheaper ones.

Analysts said the letters sent to potentially 10,000 Wells Fargo borrowers were a way for the bank to sidestep further litigation over "steering" customers into unfavorable loans — allegations that the government has made about certain Wells Fargo operations in the past...

..."It sounds like they either found some problems themselves or the regulators discovered them and told them to get things fixed," said Paul J. Miller, an analyst who follows Wells Fargo for Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co.

A little-known non-profit (New American Energy Opportunity Foundation) with ties to the oil and gas industry that has recently begun attacking President Barack Obama for restricting America's "energy opportunity" revealed late last week that it is receiving substantial funding from Sheldon Adelson, the casino owner who has dumped tens of millions of dollars into outside spending groups this election year...

...on Oct. 19, the New American Energy Opportunity Foundation, a 501(c)(4) group, made a filing with the FEC that actually disclosed the funder of a new series of radio commercials.

According to the group's report, which you can see here, the organization paid Marketel Media, of Temecula, Cal., nearly $800,000 for the production and placement of a radio ad on "energy independence issues." The filing shows that every dime of the advertisements' cost was paid for by Adelson. The Center for Responsive Politics was not able to locate a copy of the advertisement, but the group's website indicates that the organization's main issue is reducing restrictions on drilling for gas and oil in the United States.

A video posted on the group's YouTube account makes it very clear that President Barack Obama is the true target of the ad -- and that Romney is the group's solution...

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LAS VEGAS — At the Republican National Convention in Tampa last month, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson got high-fives from strangers; entertained Karl Rove, Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki in his well-stocked luxury box; ate dinner with House Speaker John Boehner; and had a private meeting with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Last week, Adelson got a front-row seat — and a shout-out from Mitt Romney — at a $1 million campaign fundraiser at a Vegas casino. Paul Ryan held a private meeting with Adelson four days after being named Romney’s running mate... http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81588.html

[font size="1"]Mitt Romney, at a campaign event with son Tagg, a partner at private equity firm (Solamere).[/font]

...the Romney family, namely Mitt, Ann, G Scott and Tagg Romney, along with Mitt's "6th son" and campaign finance chair have a secretive private equity firm called Solamere Capital Partners. This firms ties to Romney's campaign and bundlers is already well documented, along with its connection to the manufacture and distribution of voting machines. What is not as well documented is a subsidiary of that private equity firm hiring employees of a failed firm tied to a Ponzi scheme that has a long history of money laundering for Latin American drug cartels and to the Iran-Contra scandal.

...Tagg Romney is a director (of Solamere). According to the New York Times, all but one of its 11 employees came from the Charlotte office of the Stanford Financial Group, the US investment arm of convicted felon R. Allen Stanford's offshore banking and fraud network that comprised a host of companies including the Stanford International Bank, Stanford Capital Management, The Bank of Antigua, Stanford Trust and Stanford Gold and Bullion. Three of these employees, Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips, received incentive compensation related to their direct sales of securities linked to a fraud that brought down this banking network (Bambauer has left his position as managing partner. May and Phillips remain employed as partner and chief compliance officer respectively).

Allen Stanford is currently serving a 110-year prison sentence for convictions on 13 counts of fraud. His companies were placed in receivership. $8 billion of Stanford's stolen money has yet to be recovered and the victims are in court to recover those funds and incentive pay bonuses to Stanford employees (including Bambauer, May and Phillips)...

...All of the these dealings by Stanford, and the complicity of his employees in facilitating them, was public information before January 2010, when Mitt Romney addressed the first full meeting of Solamere's investors. Yet his son Tagg chose to hire into his family these alleged white collar criminals as soon as Stanford's criminal empire collapsed. The Romney family stands by the new employees ...evidenced by Tagg's response to interview questions from ThinkProgress regarding Solamere's ability to reign them in: "Hey guys, We're done here".

...Mitt Romney's 42-year-old son, who has already faced criticism for his dealings with Allen Stanford who was convicted of milking investors out of $8 Billion in a Ponzi scheme, may have much bigger questions to answer after shocking allegations brought forth by PolitcolNews.com.

The website claims that Romney owns an interest in Hart Intercivic voting machines which will be used to calculate votes in Hamilton County. If true, this raises serious questions as there were a number of red flags during the 2004 campaign that saw George Bush defeat John Kerry...

PoliticolNews.com writes:
...Solarmere’s tangled web of investments now includes Hart Intercivic voting machines which will be used in Cincinnati Ohio says Truth Out which could guarantee Mitt Romney the White House... (full article - http://www.politicolnews.com/tagg-romney-invested-in-ohio-electronic-voting-machines/)

...Obama supporters already seem to be taking the news seriously. Change.org already has an online petition up and running that calls for "Attorney General Eric Holder: Investigate Tagg Romney owning voting machines in OHIO...".