GOP WINS 49,356

GOP  WINS CONTROL

OF  CONGRESS

*  Special thanks to "Google Images", "nationalpost.com",
"nytimes.com"

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by Felicity Blaze Nooidleman

Los Angeles, CA

11. 7.14

Thanks to all our readers for returning this week for another edition of the "Noodleman Group"!  If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results than United States voters got the message and shook things up in Washington DC.  With Congressional approval ratings lower than President Obama's, and that's pretty low, it was sometimes hard to tell who the nation was fed up with, Republicans of Democrats.  Now we know it was the Democrats because the election results point to the Republicans as the best party to lead the nation in the Legislature.

With the largest majority since President Truman, Republicans will be setting the agenda in Washington and President Obama will have to try finding some new approach in working with the opposition.  Congressional Republican will also have work with the President if they want his all important signature on the bill's they will be sending to the White House to complete the legislative process.  Will they work together or will there be stalemate in government?.  Will the President be a premature "Lame Duck" before his time?  Next January will give us a clue as the new Congress takes the floor.

Republicans proved the media and political pundants wrong as they were cited for being the problem with government in Washington.  They will now be crying about government grid lock in an effort to discredit the Congress.  The press and their Union Leaders will try to have their way as they try to color the news in their favor for 2015.  

We have selected two articles from the election coverage to wrap up things up for the 2014 mid term elections and we encourage you to visit their web sites for a better look at their graphics.-  

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/u-s-election-results-republicans-expand-majority-in-house-to-near-historic-level/

U.S. Midterm Election Results 2014: Republicans Surge To Near-Historic Dominance

Donna Cassata, Associated Press | November 5, 2014 9:50 AM ET

WASHINGTON — Republicans claimed a commanding majority in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, pushing their dominance to near-historic levels as they capitalized on widespread dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama.

Republicans easily won the 218 seats required and were on track to match or surpass the 246 seats they held during President Harry S. Truman’s administration in the late 1940s. Obama will face a Republican-controlled Congress in his final two years as Republicans regained control of the Senate.

“It’s time for government to start getting results and implementing solutions to the challenges facing our country, starting with our still-struggling economy,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement.

Democrats had a few bright spots, but their hopes of keeping losses to a minimum disappeared under the Republican onslaught.

Republicans dispatched some of the last white Democrats holding House seats from the South in West Virginia and Georgia, continuing a steady march since Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and famously said Democrats would lose the region.

Conrad Black: The Republicans have given the Obama Democrats a well deserved thrashing

As all but rabid Democratic partisans suspected, the organizational talents of that party in getting its core supporters to the polls did not significantly diminish the severe and well-deserved electoral thrashing that has awaited the Obama administration almost since its re-election (in the first campaign since Martin Van Buren’s in 1840 when the incumbent did not stand on his record, and Obama was allowed to distract the voters with red herrings about a Republican “war on women”).

Republicans capitalized on growing dissatisfaction with Obama as voters took out their frustration on the party controlling the White House, even making inroads in Democratic strongholds nationwide. Aggressive in the midterms, Republicans claimed three Democratic seats in New York and upended two first-term Democrats in Illinois, Obama’s adopted home state.

Overall, Republicans gained 14 seats and counting; Democrats, just one.

In Utah, Republican Mia Love held a narrow lead was poised to become the first black Republican women in the House.
In one bright spot for the Democrats, Gwen Graham, daughter of a former senator and governor, Bob Graham, knocked out two-term Rep. Steve Southerland in a Florida district. Southerland’s all-male fundraiser and quip about Graham attending lingerie parties doomed his re-election bid.

Obama’s low approval ratings, around 40 per cent, were a drag on Democrats, as was the electorate’s unease with the Islamic State group threat, Ebola outbreak and the stagnating economy. Promising economic signs of a drop in the unemployment rate and cheaper gasoline failed to help the president’s party, which typically loses seats in midterm elections.

Some two dozen Democratic incumbents had been in jeopardy, but just a handful of Republicans faced competitive races. Republican victories in the last such elections in 2010, fueled by the rise of the ultra-conservative tea party, gave the party the advantage in redrawing congressional districts.

All 435 House seats were on the ballot Tuesday, but the roster of competitive races was less than 10 per cent of those. The Republicans came into the election holding 234 seats.

A solid Republican majority means Boehner can afford defections from his increasingly conservative caucus and still get legislation passed while Republicans would hold more committee seats to guide the party agenda.

The party that holds the White House traditionally loses seats when the president is not on the ballot, but Obama suffered an ignominious distinction. The president, whose party lost 63 seats in 2010, saw Democrats lose another 12 seats and became the two-term president with the most midterm defeats, edging past Truman’s 74 by one.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/05/u-s-election-results-republicans-expand-majority-in-house-to-near-historic-level/

Speaker of the House John Boehner (left) and the new Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell (right),  will preside over the 114th congress which will convene on
 January 3,2015.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/us/politics/midterm-democratic-losses-grow.html

After Election, Obama Vows to Work With, and Without, Congress

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and PETER BAKERNOV. 5, 2014

Photo

President Obama said Wednesday of his party’s electoral drubbing: “It doesn’t make me mopey. It energizes me, because it means that this democracy’s working.” CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama shook off an electoral drubbing on Wednesday and said he was eager to find common ground with Republicans during the final two years of his presidency, but he swiftly defied their objections by vowing to bypass Congress and use his executive authority to change the nation’s immigration system.

In a sign of how he intends to govern under a new political order with ascendant Republican leaders, Mr. Obama renewed his commitment to act on his own to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country.

His remarks, at a news conference in the East Room of the White House, were meant to put the vitriol of the campaign behind him — he responded to disaffected Americans by saying that “I hear you” and that his election mandate was to “get stuff done.” But his promised action on immigration underscored the profound partisan disagreements that persist in Washington.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a Republican who is in line to be the majority leader in the new Congress, warned Mr. Obama in a news conference in Louisville not to act on immigration on his own.

“It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” Mr. McConnell said.

The back-and-forth came on a grim day at the White House after an election that cost the Democrats the Senate and called into question the president’s capacity to accomplish much of substance in his remaining time in office.

For all the talk of cooperation, Mr. Obama confronted the reality that gridlock may still rule Washington, curtailing his legacy and frustrating his lofty ambitions.

Mr. Obama seemed determined not to let the setback consume what is left of his presidency. Relentlessly cheerful during his afternoon news conference, Mr. Obama congratulated Republicans on their election success and offered words of conciliation. But he volunteered little regret or a sense that he needed to change course.

“It doesn’t make me mopey. It energizes me, because it means that this democracy’s working,” Mr. Obama said of his party’s defeat. He struck a carefully upbeat tone, declining to “read the tea leaves” of the election or to be baited into giving it a name, along the lines of the “shellacking” he said his party had taken in the 2010 congressional elections.

Still, he noted that Republicans had had a “good night,” and conceded that he was responsible for allaying the concerns of Americans who have become convinced that Washington is dysfunctional and unresponsive to their needs.

“As president, they rightly hold me accountable to do more to make it work properly,” Mr. Obama said.

Continue reading the main story

GRAPHIC

How Big Were Tuesday’s Republican Swings?

The Republicans took control of the Senate on Tuesday, picking up at least seven seats, and expanded their majority in the House. Their victory in the Senate was significant but not the largest historically — though it could rank among the top five election year swings since 1946.

Note: Historical seat counts are from election day to election day. Data for 2014 is as of 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. Totals for Democrats include independents who caucus with them.

Sources: U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives (historical data); The Associated Press (election results)

By Hannah Fairfield and Alicia Parlapiano

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/05/us/politics/how-big-were-tuesdays-republican-swings.html

The ultimate lesson of the election, he said, was that both parties should do more to work together. He called on Congress to quickly pass an emergency request for funding to combat Ebola, and announced that he would seekcongressional authorization for his military campaign in Iraq and Syria.

He also said he would seek compromises in the coming months on trade deals, tax changes, infrastructure spending and an immigration overhaul. He offered no details.

“But what I’m not going to do is just wait,” he said of action on immigration. “I think it’s fair to say I’ve shown a lot of patience and tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to continue to do so. But in the meantime, let’s see what we can do lawfully through executive actions to improve the functioning of the system.”

In Louisville, Mr. McConnell signaled that he wanted to find compromise on key issues and make the Senate “work again” by changing the rules in the chamber. He flatly promised that Congress would not shut down the government or default on the national debt in disputes about the nation’s finances.

 “When the American people choose divided government, I don’t think it means they don’t want us to do anything,” Mr. McConnell told reporters. “We ought to start with the view that maybe there are things we can agree on to make progress for the country.”

But he, too, foreshadowed disagreements ahead, saying, “We will certainly be voting on things as well that we think the administration is not fond of.”

The new political landscape continued to take shape on Wednesday as the Republican majority in the House neared modern records and Republicans closed in on another Senate seat, this one in Alaska.

By Wednesday evening, House Republicans had netted 12 more seats, pushing their majority to 246, a level not seen since the Harry S. Truman administration. Several races still to be decided are likely to push that total higher.

Alaskans were still counting thousands of ballots, and the state is not likely to certify a winner until next week at the earliest. But Dan Sullivan, a Republican, led Senator Mark Begich, a Democrat, by about 8,000 votes, a small number but an edge of nearly four percentage points in a sparsely populated state.

Democrats were able to eke out wins for governor in Colorado and Connecticut, and they vowed to fight to protect the thin lead that Senator Mark R. Warner, Democrat of Virginia, held in his surprisingly tight race. But Gov. Patrick J. Quinn of Illinois conceded defeat in a re-election effort that included a visit by the state’s once-favored son, Mr. Obama.

As members of Mr. Obama’s party sifted through the wreckage, the president was determined to find something positive. He made a surprise appearance at the daily White House staff meeting, telling exhausted aides who had spent the previous night watching losses far more crushing than they had anticipated that he was eager to get to work and squeeze every last moment out of his remaining time in office.

It was a sign of a president now liberated from the political strictures that have bound him over the past year, when Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking him and his policies and Mr. Obama felt constrained from defending himself, worried about the potential harm it could do to vulnerable Democratic candidates.

But it also reflected a president unwilling to play what he considers the Washington game of self-flagellation after a political defeat.

Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, who fired Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld the day after the 2006 midterm elections, Mr. Obama made no personnel changes, and aides said they did not expect any.

White House officials say that Mr. Obama values Denis R. McDonough, his White House chief of staff, who seemed unflustered by the setback and flashed a broad smile in the minutes before the news conference began.

The president, for his part, made a point of showing off his good cheer in defeat — “I’m having a great time,” he said at one point during the news conference — and even of challenging his image as an aloof executive unwilling to engage in the rituals that power compromise in the capital. He said he would like to have a glass of Kentucky bourbon with Mr. McConnell.

“If the ways that we’re approaching the Republicans in Congress isn’t working, you know, I’m going to try different things, whether it’s having a drink with Mitch McConnell or letting John Boehner beat me again at golf,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the House speaker.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/06/us/politics/midterm-democratic-losses-grow.html

Next week "Noodleman" will be exploring the "Art Deco" architecture of Los Angeles and Hollywood, both past and present as we take another look at historic Los Angeles.  This has been Felicity again and hope to see you then!

GARY MCCOY Copyright 2014 Cagle Cartoons

http://theweek.com/cartoons/index/271251/obama-cartoon-midterm-election-democrats-results

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