https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY6-YVFvtFQ

While Barack Obama celebrated his re-election with a wooden victory speech that was more about Christian American God than the human beings who stood in lines to keep him in the White House, in California nobody is apologizing for big liberal wins. Governor Jerry Brown worked his Proposition 30 tax increase hard, constantly flying up and down the state on Southwest, speaking Latin and Greek to the delight and confusion of media people, and making it very clear (in English) that the rival Proposition 38 was a scam funded by a multimillionaire wingnut. Brown’s tax on the very rich won, by eight points, and Brown claimed victory with another phlegmball about “Kool-Aid of the market ideologues.” (The scam proposition, 38, was rejected by 72% of voters.)

Throughout the state, Democrats crushed entrenched Republicans, and even entrenched suburban right-wingers like Congressman Howard Berman (a registered Democrat and hawk), who lost a $13 million campaign to keep his long-safe seat in San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Democrats got a little bit closer to the fearsome Sacramento Super Majority that will finally stop the rural Republicans from blocking budget and tax measures. (This is all the miserable legacy of Proposition 13, the proto-Tea Party anti-tax voter initiative that gutted the state’s once-great public schools and infrastructure.)

Why, in the nation’s most populous state, is it okay to be a liberal again?

The Crazy Days Of Sadie Frost

by Emma Garman

A series dedicated to explaining Britain’s manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

As the British phone hacking scandal spawns new chapters, it may yet be too early to properly take stock of the vital questions, namely, how will the exposure of these unconscionable practices ultimately transform tabloid culture? And by which method can we scrub from our memories Hugh Grant’s excruciating use of the crisis as public psychotherapy? Nevertheless, with Murdoch’s minions awaiting criminal trial, we are duty-bound to weigh the consequences they hath wrought, such as possibly — and arguably most seismically — casting asunder the epochal union of Jude Law and Sadie Frost. “Did phone hacking destroy my marriage?” wondered the sometime actress and scented knickers inventor following her receipt of £50,000 in damages from News International. “If we hadn’t been so fiercely pursued by the press, how different would my life be? Would I still be married?”

Imagine that, if you even can: no Jude & Sienna, no Nannygate, no Jude & Sienna 2.0. Instead, in this alternate reality, the three Frost-Law offspring have additional siblings, Jude has kept a full head of hair, and Natural Nylon, the film production company founded in 1997 by actor friends including Sadie, Jude, Ewan McGregor and Johnny Lee Miller, remains extant. By mind-boggling extension, Johnny isn’t currently playing Sherlock opposite Lucy Liu’s Dr. Watson to very mixed reviews! It’s as if The Plot Against America were set in Primrose Hill and featured less anti-Semitism and more soul-sapping showbiz banality. But in our dimension’s timeline — whether it’s the darkest one is obviously not for this column to say — dear Sadie has struck out on her own, and maintained uninterrupted public notoriety with nothing but the sweat of her brow, a string of dalliances with foppish pretty boys, and regular vacations in the company of Kate Moss and the world’s paparazzi. That the raven-haired 47-year-old, whose only noteworthy acting role was in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula twenty years ago, has pulled this off is not so much remarkable as gloomily axiomatic of British society, where possessing any actual talent — outside of a gift for concisely obliterating the dreams of talent show entrants, which is God’s work — is nowadays an impediment to top-echelon fame.

But back to the more cheerful topic of Jude and Sadie’s abbreviated coupling: the erstwhile Mrs. Law is perhaps being a tad revisionist by placing all the blame on the voraciousness of the press. After all, they were already divorced when the News of the World exposed the general tenor of their relationship as having been, to put it delicately, rather sharply divergent from your typically humdrum haven of bourgeois domesticity. It was January 2005, a vulnerable nation had barely recovered from the shame of Prince Harry’s Nazi costume, when our last vestiges of innocence crumbled amid revelations of Sadie and Jude’s “wife-swapping sessions” with Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey and his wife, Pearl Lowe, hijinks that allegedly caused awkwardness all round when Jude fell hard for Pearl. (Aspirant swingers, do take note: it’s all fun and games until the star of Alfie gets emotional.) Then later that same year, Kate Moss’ longtime PA sensationally — and by “sensationally” I mean “at that point, not particularly surprisingly” — divulged that the cocaine-addled supermodel’s “lesbian romps” with her BFF Sadie had made poor Jude jealous, a problem that Kate, nothing if not a caring, sharing type, was happy to solve by shtupping him too.

Doubtless on the basis of all this fascinating debauchery, in 2009 a publisher, John Blake, eagerly signed up Sadie to write her autobiography. But stick-in-the-mud Jude, inconveniently, was less than thrilled at the prospect of having their mutual sordid shenanigans dredged up all over again. Shortly before the book’s 2010 publication, he issued a 100-page legal writ demanding that many passages relating to their marriage, including the reasons for its demise, be taken out. At least Sadie’s first husband, Gary Kemp of sprauncy eighties supergroup Spandau Ballet, gave the project his full blessing; unfortunately, their relationship — which, like a Homeric subplot, sprang to life when she was a 16-year-old gold-painted love object on Spandau’s “Gold” video — was as inoffensive as his song lyrics, and Sadie’s only complaint is that he could be a bit controlling. Otherwise, the most compelling memoiristic tidbits are that as a schoolgirl, Sadie was a target for flashers — “It made me uncomfortable,” she waxes philosophically, “but at the same time it intrigued me” — and played kiss chase with future political luminary David Miliband. Alas, the bowdlerized opus, entitled Crazy Days, didn’t trouble the bestseller lists.

Orgiastic bacchanalia notwithstanding, neither Jude nor Sadie have since managed to establish a relationship as stable as the one they shared. 39-year-old Jude, whose rekindled romance with Sienna Miller ended last year, has recently been involved with actress Ruth Wilson and model Nathalie Sorrell, and in 2009 a DNA test confirmed that he’d sired a daughter during his one encounter with Floridian Hooters alum Samantha Burke. (Naturally keen to observe the complex etiquette of shepherding a celeb-civilian progeny through life, Burke facilitated her daughter’s showbiz debut at age five weeks with a “world exclusive” Hello cover.) As for Sadie, following her divorce she cautiously enjoyed a meeting of the minds with a portly but kind 50-year-old accountant she met on Match.com. JK, of course: she dated flamenco guitarist Jackson Scott (14 years her junior); Welsh footballer turned actor Andy Jones (15 years her junior); Kristian Marr, the bassist in briefly-famous glam-punk band Towers of London (19 years her junior); and her current paramour, James Gooding, a model with whom there’s an age gap of a mere ten years.

Gooding, one of those special souls whose romantic urges flow naturally and exclusively toward celebrities, is best known for his three-year relationship with Kylie Minogue, on whom he cheated with various women, including Sophie Dahl, before doing a NOTW kiss-and-tell for £250,000. Kylie, he opined on the record, is a “self-obsessed, virtually friendless, control freak… I fear she’s going to end up a lonely spinster with only a cat by her side for company.” This white knight of the sponsored bar circuit is persona non grata around Kate Moss, who deems his reputation beyond the pale and in August banned him from her yacht trip to Mallorca and St. Tropez. You might think that an injunction from Mossy, not a woman renowned for living according to strict moral imperatives, would cast a suitor’s eligibility in an even worse light than his bad-mouthing of a superstar ex in exchange for a Murdoch-signed check. But apparently, vegetarian yoga-devotee Sadie’s Zen approach to love overcomes all glaring red flags. True, she recently had reason, as yet tantalizingly undisclosed, to physically attack James at her home; police were involved and she was given a formal caution — an admission of guilt without a conviction — but the newspapers confirmed that her victim didn’t require hospital treatment, so no biggie. “The press about the fight got blown out of proportion,” Sadie told a reporter. “I wouldn’t rule out marriage again. It could be third time lucky.” Or the precise scenario for which cast-iron pre-nups were invented, but hey, tomato/tamahto.

This latest fracas has eerie echoes of an incident back in 2003, when police were called to Sadie’s house following an allegation that Jude had assaulted her; she declined to take the matter further, and Jude’s camp claimed that she orchestrated the incident to demonize him as they bitterly wrangled over the terms of the divorce. According to court papers, she blamed him for exacerbating her post-natal depression following the birth of their third child — a dark period during which their two-year-old daughter swallowed an Ecstasy pill she picked up off the floor at a children’s party, and Sadie was held against her will in a Los Angeles psych ward after Jude told her it was over. Attempts by her family to have her released were fruitless, but eventually Gavin Rossdale arrived to heroically transfer her to his house in Los Feliz. Mercifully, in its infinite wisdom the California statute empowers A-list celebrities — even those who’ve accrued their millions via a collection of just-this-side-of-actionable Nirvana tributes — to overrule any clinical or judicial constraints.

Sadie, who says she’s been in therapy since she was sixteen, has also dabbled in AA and these days mentions her teetotal status at every opportunity (contra suggestions that she’s still “glugging back the booze”), although it’ll be a while before she can begin to shake off her hard-partying image. A former managing director of FrostFrench, the fashion label founded by Sadie in 1999 with her friend Jemima French, described daily life at the company as characterized by drunken tantrums and comical ineptitude, “like an episode of ‘Absolutely Fabulous.’” Sadie, according to Sharon O’Connor, “had a very short attention span and we’d have some meetings at her house to make it easier for her. She would sometimes cancel, though, especially if the meeting was in the morning. She’d explain that she’d had a big night and ask if we could meet later.” While it is tempting to point out that being regularly photographed in a “refreshed state” is the central pillar of any celebrity’s business plan, O’Connor insisted that she wouldn’t have minded Sadie falling out of nightclubs “if she’d done it in a FrostFrench dress, but she never did.”

FrostFrench, which began by selling vanilla-scented underwear and later branched out into clothes, went bankrupt in 2008 with debts of millions. “The thing about the recession,” observed an uncharitable magazine editor, “is that it finds people out. FrostFrench always got publicity because of Sadie’s name and her celebrity friends, but it’s not enough.” Still, a consortium of foreign investors came to the rescue, and while all the FrostFrench stores were permanently shuttered, the brand survives with a department store lingerie line and a new nightwear range. Mother of four Sadie, a self-styled domestic goddess whose fondest moments are spent baking organic cashew nut bread, has also lent her esteemed imprimatur to the high-spec kitchens in a riverside apartment complex in East London. Tempted buyers should know, however, that as per usual when art meets commerce, Sadie’s unstinting vision was compromised. “We do all our own dehydrating and juicing,” she shared, “so that was something I talked about when I was designing the kitchens.” Yet the suits, infuriatingly, drew the line at including a dehydrator along with the built-in steamer and wine fridge. “I can’t change the world overnight,” conceded Sadie, lest anyone had confused her turn as a gangster’s moll in Love, Honour and Obey with Susan B. Anthony’s speech on women’s suffrage.

Not that Sadie’s thespian talents go entirely unappreciated these days: she has performed in two iterations of a one-woman show about an obsessive Madonna fan, “Touched For the Very First Time,” which had a six week run in 2009, and “Touched… Like A Virgin,” which ran for three weeks this past spring. The plays proved divisive among the theatrical community, with critical responses running the gamut from “endearing and charismatic” (The Telegraph) to “quite the most moronic thing I have seen in the theatre in years” (The Times). And she’s currently shooting a British movie, Molly Moon: The Incredible Hypnotist, adapted from a children’s novel by Georgia Byng, along with, thrillingly, Joan Collins. It would be lovely to hope that doughty old treasure Joan will sit Sadie down and offer some much needed pearls of wisdom: the feeding and discipline of sexually indeterminate toy-boys, spacing out one’s five weddings appropriately, holding back the years with wigs and Vaseline, and so forth.

Looking to the future, supporters of independent cinema will be invigorated by the news that Sadie has formed a new production company with two partners, Blonde to Black Pictures. Most excitingly, she has promised to use the venture as a launching pad for Kate Moss’ new acting career. No word yet on whether the right vehicle has been found for this historic collaboration, but I think we can rest assured that with Sadie at the helm, the result will do absolute justice to Kate’s criminally untapped potential as the leading lady de nos jours.

Previously: Prince Harry, Millennial Royal

Emma Garman no longer lives in her native UK, but she still watches lots of its TV. She’s also on Twitter.

“We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives.”

somewhere Peggy Noonan is deleting old columns; MT @paulbegala POTUS won Catholics 50–47. He. Won. Catholics.

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) November 7, 2012

(In case you’ve forgotten: “There are 77.7 million Catholics in the United States. In 2008 they made up 27% of the electorate, about 35 million people. Mr. Obama carried the Catholic vote, 54% to 45%. They helped him win. They won’t this year. And guess where a lot of Catholics live? In the battleground states. There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney’s gaffes a little bitty thing. There was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him. Enjoy it while you can. You have awakened a sleeping giant.”)

I’m a @fivethirtyeight admirer. But I had no idea that liberals thought the core function of the political press is to predict who wins.

— Chris Suellentrop (@suellentrop) November 7, 2012

There are so many things that are wrong with this statement, but mainly: the “liberals” (and, presumably, “everyone else”?) wanted a “political press” that wasn’t lying to them. Because what was happening with predictions over the last week was that MANY PEOPLE WERE JUST LYING. Newt Gingrich said Romney would get “over 300” electoral votes. That’s not about accuracy or misjudgment. That’s just lying on the T.V. shows. Because the popular press, which is mostly TV, hires people who are not the press; they are actually operatives. So the enthusiasm for Nate Silver was actually a reprieve from the political press. And their job is to lie on the T.V. Let’s review who expected Mitt Romney to get 206 electoral votes (Florida still being out, caveat). For starters: NOT ANN COULTER.

Whoopsie! RT @anncoulter: I can’t see a scenario where Romney wins less than 273 electoral votes.

— Clare O’Connor (@Clare_OC) November 7, 2012

And:

Just revisiting this Michael Barone column: “Bottom line: Romney 315, Obama 223.” bit.ly/WAfV9g

— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) November 7, 2012

And there are many, many, many more. Such as: everyone who has worked in some capacity for the Republican party.

So who thought Obama would get either 303 or 329?

From our pundit roundup, Jamelle Bouie, Jennifer Granholm and Matthew Dowd all came in at 303. And our own forecast predictor, Evan Hughes, came in with an ambitious 323. (AKA, “the Colorado surprise,” but including Florida, which may happen.)

“This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones. To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.”
 — Hahahaha, remember this?

Congratulations to Pres Obama and his team on their terrific victory..

— Jack Welch (@jack_welch) November 7, 2012

One of the weirdest words to infiltrate Election 2012 wasn’t “binders” or “rape.” It was “classy,” as in some guy in sweatpants surveying the omelet bar at an Embassy Suites buffet and saying to his wife, “This is a classy joint, they got shrimps in the eggs and everything.”

But now, in this glorious second term of Barack Obama’s imperial socialist presidency, “classy” is used to describe a powerful plutocrat when he briefly controls his vulgarian outbursts for long enough to express basic good manners. The right-wing wealthy in this country have become rage monsters, like The Hulk but without a compelling backstory. We have allowed this to happen.

Any public behavior more restrained than Donald Trump is worthy of a respectful golf clap in the unhinged world of America’s chief executives and other moneyed sociopaths. Mitt Romney was wheeled out to recite whatever platitudes his handlers stuck in his flashcard slot last night, and thousands of commentators both liberal and “objective” rushed to describe the empty-eyed concession as “classy.”

Jack Welch, a rich and powerful American, should be gracious enough to not be a giant asshole in public. So when he manages a tweet’s worth of congratulations for the president, it at best deserves a “glad you managed to control yourself for a minute while something important was going on, sociopath.” Instead, Twitter sang out a chorus of “classy” praise.

“Classy” is a peculiarly American term, in its pre-Election 2012 use. In an allegedly class-free nation, the lower classes used it to praise behavior they considered worthy of their upper-class betters. Putting plastic covers on a sofa or not unbuttoning your pants once you got full at a restaurant, these were classy ways to act. Momentarily not being a jerk isn’t classy. It’s just another reminder that an unhinged person is probably up to no good again.

Class in America was once about subtle and not-so-subtle ways of displaying power and wealth. “Classy” was the way people of lesser means let each other know their behavior was upstanding, worthy of the rich! Now the very rich are utter cretins, and 140 characters of not being a dick on Twitter is enough to win a weary nation’s appreciation.

“’At some point we’re going to have to assess whether it’s economically viable to maintain our coasts in the places where they are,’ said Cheryl Hapke, a coastal geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.”

by Michael Morris Hurt

From time to time, the Awl offers its space to members of the community with an interesting viewpoint on current events. Today we hear from a Republican party strategist who is concerned with the party’s recent difficulties at the federal level.

This morning, and over the next few days, you will see a lot of conversation about the ways in which the Republican party needs to change if it wants to return to being a successful power in national politics. While there will be a number of arguments about demographics, economic opportunity and social outreach, it seems pretty clear that the most important thing the Republican party needs to do is make sure that the American public is considerably less aware of our obsession with rape.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we were beaten fair and square. When I predicted that Mitt Romney would win 315 electoral votes I might have been right on the fundamentals, but I was wrong on a lot of other important factors: the clear difference between national and state election polls, the Obama campaign’s ability to turn out the early vote, an intense focus on target-state mechanics. These all played a role in the Republican loss. But another contributing factor to the Obama victory is the fact the people see us as the party of rape, and that is no longer the net positive it used to be.

Look, in this environment with this economy and all the gravely important matters pressing against the very existence of this country, it should have been a tsunami election. It should have been a landslide that sent President Obama into the dust heap of failed presidencies. Instead, the election was about rape, and not in the good way we’ve come to expect. If you drill down on the numbers, every election until 2008 shows a significant advantage for the Republicans, as the party of rape, among pro-rape voters. It is no accident that political scientists have come up with the phrase “culture of rape” to describe one of the key demographics that has been a fundamental building block for our electoral coalition: We are a party that loves rape. We love rape as much, if not more, than we hate the idea of women having control over their own bodies. We CANNOT GET ENOUGH RAPE. Even just hearing the word makes us salivate.

So where did we go wrong? This is a difficult idea to consider, but some of the data seems to indicate that the American public is, at least at the margins, slightly less enamored with the concept of rape than we as a party are. In fact — and this is hard to believe, but many of the models we have run seem to bear it out — there are several elements among the electorate (college-educated professionals, homosexuals, havers of vaginas) that tend to view rape as a bad, or at least not good, thing. You can blame political correctness or our crumbling educational system or the fact that people are no longer willing to judge what a woman is dressed like when she is clearly asking for it, but the fact is those rape votes are going, and they are unlikely to return.

What, then, is the solution? After a loss of this magnitude the more conservative elements of the party will be tempted to double down on rape. “It is rape that got us here,” they will say, “and if we turn our backs on rape we will never be able to force ourselves on the public again. We need to ram home, no matter how unwanted some say it is, that we are the party of rape. Rape rape rape rape rape.” While I am sympathetic to this viewpoint, any rational reading of the results seems to show that not only can we not rely on rape to get us over anymore, but we have to pretend that we, at the very least, are no longer fully lustful for rape to happen to all those women in the nation who need a lesson taught to them.

It is perhaps still too early to determine how we best avoid this subject with the general population. In the coming months those of us on the analytical side of the party will convene a number of focus groups to figure out the most effective code words and signals we can use to indicate to our core base of rape lovers that we are still wildly pro-rape, while not alerting the rest of the country that the Republican party is, above all, a party that loves rape. Like, cannot get enough rape. Needs rape deep in the fiber of its being. In the meantime, I suggest we change the focus by making a concerted effort to demonize Hispanics. I mean, that’s a sure-fire winner, right?

Republican pollster Michael Morris Hurt, like all Republicans, loves rape and hates poor people.

After working around the clock for days and testing systems all night, the first G trains for passengers started rolling at 8:55 am.

— MTA (@MTAInsider) November 7, 2012

Welcome back to New York City, isolated communities of Greenpoint and Fort Greene and Clinton Hill and near-Bed Stuy and South Williamsburg!