The chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, Corey Stewart (R), is running for Virginia Lieutenant Governor in 2013. But the former co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s 2012 Virginia campaign effort will have to contend with his one of the same challenges in a state Romney lost with just 47 percent of the vote: Cayman Islands investments.

A ThinkProgress review of Stewart’s 2012 financial disclosures reveals that one of his largest personal holdings — between $10,001 and $50,000 as of January 2012 — is in the DWS Enhanced Commodity Strategy mutual fund. The fund, managed by Deutsche Bank’s DWS Investments, lists its largest investment as “DWS CAYMAN COMMODITY II LTD.”

According to fund documents, that means the fund is heavily invested in a DWS Cayman Island subsidiary. The Cayman Islands, a well-known tax haven, was famously a well-known home for Romney’s off-shored money.

While the tax advantages of investing the Caymans may not accrue to Stewart and other shareholders directly, they can provide a great benefit to the investment managers at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. Stewart is well-familiar with these rules, as a well-paid international trade lawyer for both U.S. and international corporations.

Stewart, like Romney, has been a strong advocate of the idea tax cuts magically lead to balanced budgets. Like Romney, he advocates deregulating business, wants to pursue anti-LGBT and anti-women social policies, and believes Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws are the ideal model.

At the annual Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, President Obama jokingly name-checked the New York Times election stats guru Nate Silver. “Once again,” Obama joked, “Nate Silver completely nailed it,” referring to the President’s decision to “pardon” both of the turkeys in question after a Facebook vote by permitting them to live out their lives rather than be slaughtered to make a Thanksgiving meal.

Watch Obama’s remarks:

Like other statistical models, Silver’s algorithm correctly predicted all fifty states in the Presidential election, despite vicious criticism of his approach as having a “liberal bias.”

Former Mitt Romney adviser Dan Senor conceded that in the aftermath of President Obama’s re-election, Republicans can’t start every economic debate insisting on lower tax rates and must do a “better job of thinking through how to talk about middle class economics.”

“We have to spend meaningful time over the next several years developing a policy agenda that reflects our principles but is modernized,” he said during an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Unless we address the core issue of middle class economics with innovative ideas,” Republicans will continue to struggle in future elections. Watch it:

Senor also agreed that Republicans must tackle immigration reform, arguing that the party “has been suffering on the issue of immigration for years.” “I think the problem transcends Mitt Romney. I don’t think his position helped the Republcian problem, but I think it predates him.”

Since the election, several prominent Republicans have called on the GOP to lead on the issue, though they remain split on whether to tackle the problem in a single comprehensive reform or piecemeal.

Election exit polls also showed that voters rejected the GOP’s main economic argument — their insistance that the nation should not raise taxes on the richest Americans. “Almost half of voters said taxes should be boosted on Americans making more than $250,000 per year, and one in seven voters said taxes should be increased on all Americans.”

Scientists agree: the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. But don’t tell that to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) — he thinks the age of the Earth can be discovered by studying the Bible.

In an interview with GQ magazine, Rubio suggested that the age of the Earth was “a dispute among theologians” and that there is no way to know the truth about the age of the Earth:

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

RUBIO: I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I’m not a scientist. I don’t think I’m qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to answer that. It’s one of the great mysteries.

The age of the Earth isn’t much of a mystery to scientists, who use methods like radiometric dating to determine how old the Earth is with relative precision. To suggest we can’t know how old the Earth is, then, is to deny the validity of these scientific methods altogether — a maneuver familiar to Rubio, who also denies the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

Rubio isn’t the only figure in his party to challenge the scientific approach to the age of the Earth. Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) said “I don’t have any idea” how old the Earth is, while former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R-AR) suggested “we just don’t know.”

Mitt Romney’s comments to donors about the “gifts” that President Barack Obama gave to constituents to win the election continue to cause members of his party to run away from the former candidate. Despite their insistence during the election that Romney’s position on entitlement in America was accurate, the new consensus among the GOP politicians, if not their pundits, is that Romney’s statements could not be more wrong.

After several prominent Republican governors expressed their disagreement with Romney’s statements, the hits have continued coming. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, considered at one point by the Romney campaign as a possible running mate, said on Friday, “You can’t expect to be a leader of all the people and be divisive. You have to talk about themes, policies that unite people, and play to their aspirations and their goals and their hopes for their family and their neighbors.”

Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor and another potential running mate for Romney, though silent on Romney’s 47% comments, likewise shot-down Romney’s “gifts” theory.

Those who didn’t outright disagree with Romney’s words disagreed with his message. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) stated that it wasn’t his intention to vilify those who are beneficiaries of public assistance programs:

People can be on public assistance and scheme the system and that’s real, these systems are teetering on bankruptcy. But most people on public assistance don’t have a character flaw. They just have a tough life. I want to create more jobs. The focus should be on creating more jobs, not demonize those who find themselves on hard times.

Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gave an interview highlighting his issues with Romney’s belief. “I don’t want to rebut him point by point. I would just say to you, I don’t believe that we have millions and millions of people in this country that don’t want to work,” Rubio said. “I think we have millions of people in this country that are out of work and are dependent on the government because they can’t find a job.”

New Mexico governor Susana Martinez (R) and top Romney surrogate to the Hispanic community Carlos Guiterrez have also joined in the chorus disparaging Romney’s statements and calling for more inclusiveness in the Republican party. It’s unfortunate that this many Republican politicians seem to have discovered the divisiveness of their party’s policies towards minorities and the working class only after a massive loss to President Obama.

We’re now well into the political aftermath of the 2012 election, and the pattern of destruction is telling. In demographic after demographic, Obama defeated Romney by remarkable margins: 55 percent among women, 60 percent among voters under 30, 71 percent among Hispanic voters, and a stratospheric 93 percent among African-Americans. Rather than a fluke, the Obama coalition of 2008 looks like it’s here to stay, and the recriminations and soul-searching amongst conservatives and Republicans are in full swing.

The sudden post-election shift of major politicians and media figures on immigration reform betrayed a fear that their party’s hard-line stance wrecked its chances with Hispanics. A chorus of conservative bloggers, Republican strategists, and even what’s left of the party’s moderate politicians have laid blame on its nurturance of white nativism, its tone-deafness on women’s reproductive challenges, or the absolutism of its anti-abortion rhetoric.

There’s certainly some truth to these takes. But this notion that scattershot appeasement of various voting blocks is the path back for Republicans makes a fundamental error. It buys into conservatives’ silly caricature of Democrats as a party without a vision — “an incoherent amalgam of interest groups, most of which are vying for benefits for themselves and their members at the expense of other Americans,” as Yuval Levin bitterly put it.

There is, in fact, a fundamental vision that unites virtually all the disparate groups in Obama’s coalition. It’s sitting right there in the exit polling and the narrative of the campaign, for anyone willing to see it. Crudely put, it’s the economic issues: on the practical level, the recognition that the free market, whatever its virtues, does not deal justly with people when left to its own devices. And on the moral level, the simple, elegant, age-old conviction that we are all our brother’s keeper. And it’s the GOP’s rejection of these propositions that set it on the path to electoral defeat.
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The owner of the Southwest Shooting Authority in Pinetop, Arizona is testing out a new business strategy: banning anyone who voted for President Obama from the store.

Owner Cope Reynolds took out an ad in the local newspaper announcing his new policy, writing “If you voted for Barack Obama, your business is not welcome at Southwest Shooting Authority.” A similar sign is posted on the front door of the shop as well.

Reynolds prefaced his ad campaign with a letter posted to firearm news website AmmoLand:

Effective immediately, if you voted for Obama, your money is no good here. You have proven beyond a doubt that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm. We have just put a sign up on the front door to save you the trouble of walking all the way in here….

Gun advocates have been notoriously critical of the Obama administration for its perceived slights of the second amendment, this despite overseeing the expansion of gun rights during Obama’s first four years in the White House.

Reynolds’ feelings about a second Obama administration were hardly a secret before his ad appeared, taking to Facebook to lend his support for the fringe secessionist movement that has sprung up in reaction to Obama’s reelection as well as the notion that President Obama is coming for conservatives’ guns.

[h/t TPM]

On Thursday, the head of the Maine Republican Party found himself on the wrong side of controversy after he questioned the legitimacy of “dozens” of black people voting at the polls on Election Day. “Nobody in town knows anyone who’s black,” Charlie Webster — who has since apologized for his comments — declared.

Such faulty logic is more widespread throughout the Republican party, it seems. Racial justice news site ColorLines published a video the day after the election of a self-identified Republican poll worker in Colorado who can be heard phoning in his concerns that “a very high concentration of people of color” were turning out in his precinct, and that such turnout was suspicious because he normally sees fewer minorities “at the mall”:

“Yeah, a very high concentration of people of color. It’s not a problem, but, you know, when I go to the mall I see, you know this amount. Well I’m seeing at least double or triple that amount here. So what I’m saying is, it looks to me like this voting location was selected as the place they told everyone to come.”

Watch it:

As with Webster, the poll worker, identified by Color Lines as Dayton Conway, offers no evidence of any foul play at all other than his gut feeling that there were more minorities at his polling location than he normally sees at the mall. Conway perhaps failed to note that his polling location — the Arapahoe County CentrePoint Plaza in Aurora, Colorado — was one of 32 designated voting centers where voters who are registered anywhere in Arapahoe County could cast their ballots, meaning the turnout there might not be reflective of the precinct’s actual demographics.

Sadly, Conway’s instinctual suspicion of minority voters is something of a trend for Republicans this year. After the election, Rep. Paul Ryan blamed “urban voters” for costing him the vice presidency, while Mitt Romney argued that Obama won reelection by doling out “gifts” like health care, affordable education and food to minority groups and the impoverished.

Republican governors Bobby Jindal (LA) and Scott Walker (WI) spoke out against Mitt Romney’s claim that Obama won because he gave minorities and young people “big gifts” in the form of Obamacare, his DREAM directive, and partial college loan forgiveness. At the Republican Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jindal called the statement “absolutely wrong,” saying, “I absolutely reject that notion.” Walker, who was on a panel with Jindal when he denounced Romney, agreed that the GOP isn’t “just for people who are currently not dependent on the government. It’s for all Americans.”

Both governors, who were Romney surrogates, stayed quiet during Romney’s earlier iteration of this idea, when he told donors that 47 percent of Americans “believe they are victims” and will never “take personal responsibility.” Walker ducked the controversy at the time, saying “That’s a statement he has to take on, not myself.” Jindal also deferred judgment, refusing to “be one of these political pundits.”

But after a definitive loss down the ticket on Election Night, Republicans are doing some “brutally honest” soul-searching about the future of their party. Jindal was especially outspoken, imploring the GOP to “stop being the stupid party.” He was blunt in his newfound criticism for Romney in an interview with Politico:

The Republican Party is going to fight for every single vote. That means the 47 percent and the 53 percent…We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.

Other top Republicans lavished blame on Romney at the conference and complained that the campaign did not offer enough specifics to combat Obama.

Romney told donors in a call on Wednesday that Obama won because he “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift,” before going on to explain how several of the presidents’ policies have directly helped these Americans.

Mitt Romney is attributing his loss in the 2012 election to the “gifts” President Obama gave to minority voters, the Los Angeles Times is reporting. Speaking to donors on Wednesday, the former Massachusetts governor praised his own campaign, but speculated that Obama won because he was “very generous” to his base:

Mitt Romney told his top donors Wednesday that his loss toPresident Obama was a disappointing result that neither he or his top aides had expected, but said he believed his team ran a “superb” campaign with “no drama,” and attributed his rival’s victory to “the gifts” the administration had given to blacks, Hispanics and young voters during Obama’s first term.

Obama, Romney argued, had been “very generous” to blacks, Hispanics and young voters. He cited as motivating factors to young voters the administration’s plan for partial forgiveness of college loan interest and the extension of health coverage for students on their parents’ insurance plans well into their 20s. Free contraception coverage under Obama’s healthcare plan, he added, gave an extra incentive to college-aged women to back the president. [...]

“The President’s campaign,” he said, “focused on giving targeted groups a big gift—so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars.”

The comments echo the claims Romney made during a private high-dollar fundraiser earlier this year. In the video first published by Mother Jones, Romney argued that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent upon government.”

In his first interview since losing the election, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) also wouldn’t admit that voters rejected the ticket’s economic vision and instead chalked up Obama’s victory to a large turnout of the “urban vote.”

Romney and Ryan however, also lost states with very low minority populations, including New Hampshire, Iowa, Maine and Vermont.

After President Obama won reelection, Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp. immediately laid off more than 160 workers, blaming clean air protections and taxes. Before Murray announced its “survival mode” layoffs, the company donated $100,000 to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in September, according to FEC records reported by Politico.

Murray responded that “the donation to American Crossroads, which was made several months in advance of the layoffs, and our decision to layoff employees are two totally unrelated events.” Since 2011, Murray Energy has spent at least $1.24 million on political contributions exclusively backing Republicans and $1.57 million on lobbying. Murray himself was active in Republican election efforts, personally campaigning and donating to the Romney campaign.

Last Thursday, a memo addressed to Murray emlpoyees said “we cannot bleed cash waiting for our competitors to be eliminated.” When Murray addressed laid-off workers, he literally sent them off with a prayer:

Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build. We ask for your guidance in this drastic time with the drastic decisions that will be made to have any hope of our survival as an American business enterprise.

Obama’s first term has not shown any indication coal suffers from a “drastic time.” Ohio coal mining jobs were up 30 percent from 2007, to 2,570 jobs, and coal industry employment grew nationwide to reach its highest level since 1996. The coal layoffs the industry often blames on Obama are driven by economic forces, not regulations, as utilities use significantly cheaper natural gas.

Murray drew criticism this year for using coal miners as a political tool. Murray Energy allegedly forced coal miners to attend a Romney campaign rally without pay and to contribute to Republican candidates.

Our guest blogger is Jack Jenkins, a Writer and Researcher with the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative.

When election returns began pouring in on Tuesday, progressives were quick to declare the election a resounding victory for President Obama, Democratic candidates, and progressive ideals such as marriage equality and the DREAM Act. A deeper look at Tuesday’s results reveals that the 2012 election season was also a resounding defeat for the political engine that has long catapulted the GOP to power: The Religious Right.

Here five ways the Religious Right imploded during the 2012 election:

1) Evangelicals failed to produce a viable candidate. While Rick Perry looked to be the evangelical darling in the early days of the Republican primary, his various “oops” moments forced evangelical Protestants to flock to Rick Santorum, a conservative Catholic. But while Santorum won the support of many evangelicals, his passionate embrace of evangelical positions on abortion and contraception made him unappealing to many women voters. In the end, the machinery of the Religious Right failed to produce a candidate that fired up conservative Protestants, forcing the Romney campaign to work twice as hard to excite the GOP’s evangelical base.

2) Conservative efforts to shift the Catholic vote flopped. After the Obama administration announced the HHS contraceptive coverage requirement earlier this year, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops launched a “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign criticizing the Obama administration and urging Catholics to cast their votes in support of “religious freedom.” The effort failed miserably: Not only did Obama win the Catholic vote overall in 2012 (50% of Catholics voted for Obama while 48% supported Romney), but Pew Research found that the vast majority of American Catholics (78%) knew little to nothing about the bishop’s expensive campaign. Instead, Catholic voters appeared more supportive of the efforts of Sister Simone Campbell and the Nuns on the Bus who spoke out against Paul Ryan’s budget.

3) Evangelical voter turnout efforts fell short. Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition targeted Ohio this year in an effort to increase evangelical turnout, promising to go “all in” by sending voter guides to churches and launching a “major push” to get evangelicals to the polls through a robust get-out-the-vote effort. But when the results came in on Tuesday, Obama had actually performed better among white evangelicals in Ohio than he did in 2008: White evangelicals in Ohio favored John McCain by a 71%-27% margin in 2008, but favored Romney by a smaller margin – 69%-30% – in 2012. Despite all the energy expended by the Religious Right, their turnout efforts failed to have any marked impact on the most crucial state of the general election.

4) Traditionally evangelical candidates lost en masse because of radical views and bad theology. Conservative Christian and then-Missouri Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin caused a stir within the Republican Party when he spoke about “legitimate rape,” but evangelical leaders were quick to come to his aid. But when Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who attends an evangelical church, referred to women impregnated through rape as having been given “a gift from God,” voters across the country – including many evangelicals – began asking questions about this new breed of politician. Ultimately, voters decided that Akin and Mourdock’s radical theology was simply too extreme: They and several like-minded candidates suffered a series of staggering defeats all across the country on Tuesday.

5) The efforts of anti-gay religious leaders didn’t stop voters from supporting marriage equality. When marriage equality amendments were put on the ballot in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington this year, conservative Christian groups moved quickly to try and dissuade people from supporting the freedom to marry. Famed evangelist Billy Graham even launched a massive “Vote Biblical Values” ad campaign, which, among other things, urged voters to oppose candidates who supported marriage equality. Undaunted, pro-marriage equality activists capitalized on groundswells of support among religious groups and ran ads featuring pastors and other religious leaders passionately endorsing same-sex marriage. In the end, Americans voted in favor of marriage equality in three (and probably four) states, dealing a resounding defeat to the anti-gay bastions of the Religious Right.

The 2012 election season appears to have been an ominous one for the Religious Right, and – if the trend continues – may very well signal the end of their traditional dominance of Republican politics. Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, has already voiced the opinion that the Religious Right is hemorrhaging support across the country, and should put less focus on abortion and gay marriage and give more attention to issues such as immigration reform, poverty, and increasing adoptions and foster care opportunities. Whether or not religious conservatives can make that shift remains to be seen, but, in the meantime, the Religious Right looks to have already lost persuasive power with many American voters.

Though Congress remains whiter, older, and more male than the nation as a whole, the incoming class will be the most diverse in history.

The 113th Congress will be more representative of the United States from race to religion, and from gender to sexual orientation. It will look more like America with 4 new African American representatives, 10 new Latinos, 5 new Asian Americans and 24 women in the House or Senate.* It will believe more like America with the first two Hindu congresspeople, the first Buddhist senator, and the first non-theist to openly acknowledge her belief prior to getting elected. It will love more like America, with 4 new LGBT congresspeople or senators, including the first openly bisexual congresswoman and the first openly gay congressman of color. And it will be younger, with four new congressmen born in the 1980s.

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Texas Megachurch pastor and former Rick Perry supporter Robert Jeffress predicted on the Sunday before Election Day that President Obama’s re-election “would lead to the reign of the Antichrist” in the United States:

“I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he’s not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes,” said Jeffress.

“President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist.”

Jeffress added that “it is time for Christians to stand up and to push back against this evil that is overtaking our nation” and to do so via “the ballot box.”

The pastor last stirred controversy in 2011, when he implied that Christians shouldn’t vote for Mitt Romney because Mormonism is a “cult.” “As evangelical Christians, we understand that Mormonism is not Christianity,” he said at the Values Voters Summit in October. “The decision for evangelical Christians right now is going to be do we prefer someone who is truly a believer in Jesus Christ or someone…who is a part of a cult.” During the same interview, Jeffers insisted that “70 percent of the gay population” has AIDS.

Romney ended up winning white evangelicals by “essentially the same percentage (79 percent) that he won Mormons (78 percent).”

During a panel discussion this afternoon on Fox News’ program Happening Now, network contributor Cal Thomas hijacked a discussion about the media’s coverage of the presidential election by invoking a Nazi comparison to describe President Obama’s second-term agenda.

THOMAS: But look, about that Newsweek cover, if that’s Napoleon, people who know anything history know about Waterloo. Napoleon’s problem was he was overextended in Russia like so many other advancing systems, the Nazis being just another one of them. I think if Obama takes this as a mandate to complete the restructuring of America, he is sadly mistaken.

Thomas was referring to this week’s unfortunate cover of Newsweek magazine, which portrays President Obama as the French general above the headline “The Obama Conquest: Lucky General of Master of the Game?” Without offering a shred of evidence to support his claim that Obama would use his reelection as a mandate “to complete the restructuring of America,” — probably because no such evidence exists — Thomas reminded his viewers that the Nazis also sought to introduce a new system of governance.

Watch it:

Cal Thomas is a long time Fox News contributor and Washington Examiner columnist, carving out a niche for offensive, false and otherwise inappropriate comments. In February, he called MSNBC host Rachel Maddow “the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception,” and blamed the horrific attacks in Norway last year on lax gun laws just three days after 80 people, mostly young children, were murdered.