America’s safety net is one of our most maligned and threatened public institutions, where attacks rely on arguments about decreasing the size of government and “entitlement reform.” But a funny thing happens when you ask Americans what they are willing to cut: the answer is, not much. Americans recognize that our safety net provides stability and security to our loved ones and our communities. These aren’t far-off programs that help people somewhere else. They’re programs that touch the lives of the people you interact with every day.

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What’s more, Americans are willing to pay for these programs:

Solid majorities of Americans across all age groups want to maintain or increase Social Security spending, and many want to do so by raising payroll taxes and raising or eliminating the earnings cap.

Late last year as unemployment benefits ran out for millions of Americans still out of work after the recession, a majority of Americans supported extending those benefits.

More than 70% of Americans supported maintaining or increasing aid to the needy, and more Americans would increase than decrease such aid.

After being declared winner, Scott Walker says he still hasn't received a concession call from Chris Christie for 2016.

I’m not sure what jackasses controlling the Democratic party decided that they needed to run away from the president, but I hope all their asses are fired. I’ve never been more ashamed to be a Democrat than I was during this election. I’m a fighter; I might lose, but I damn sure won’t lose selling out to fear. I’ll stand by my conviction, what it is I believe in and if I lose, so be it. At the end of the day I lost fighting for my beliefs and staying true to myself. Democrats lost running away from one of the most successful presidents in modern history because they didn’t have the internal fortitude to stand up and fight, proudly informing the American people of all the great things that have been accomplished these last 6 years.

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There’s no way in hell Republicans wouldn’t stand proudly, even arrogantly, next to one of their presidents if they had created over 10 million jobs (and counting) and they were the Commander-in-Chief who found and authorized the killing of the man responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths and the greatest terrorist attack on our nation’s soil. My God, they would be pushing for a national holiday in his name.

Instead, Democrats ran away from him. If these idiots could manage to piece together even one coherent thought to realize something fairly obvious, doing so actually justified their opponents’ propaganda. Because why the hell would any voter that’s torn between two candidates vote for one who essentially agreeing with their opponent’s political rhetoric that the leader of their party has been a failure?

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And it’s like I said to people during this election, when these candidates turned on Obama, it ticked off the Democratic base who are still big fans of the president. Just how the hell were these cowardly Democrats planning to “energize the base” to vote for them, while acting like fools trying to avoid the president’s record that many these voters believed was something these candidates should have been boasting about? One of the many things I’ve learned in my years studying politics is that if a candidate can’t motivate and energize their base during an election, they’re not going to win. And that’s exactly what we saw this year.

Alabama Reportedly Changes Rules at Last Minute to Bar Public Housing IDs for Voting

According to a report from Aviva Shen at Think Progress (please see the cautionary note about that reporter below), the state of Alabama has decided at the last minute, just last Friday, that Public Housing IDs would not be sufficient for voting in today's mid-term elections.

The determination is reportedly a last minute interpretation of Alabama's new polling place Photo ID restriction by the state Attorney General, and does not appear to have been used during primary elections earlier this year...

Alabama, which is testing out its new voter ID law for the first time this year, will not accept public housing ID at the polls.

Bernard Simelton of the Alabama NAACP State Conference told ThinkProgress that he learned Friday that voters will not be able to use their public housing ID under the Attorney General's interpretation of the new law. Simelton said he wasn't sure why, but speculated that the restriction was because the town of Bayou La Batre's housing authority is run by a private entity. "So it's not a government-run program. The city owns the property, but a private company runs it," he said.