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Leave it to the good folks at Fox News to find the humor in trying to survive off food stamps. Stuart Varney brought up the subject after Newark Mayor Cory Booker accepted a challenge to live off food stamps for one week.

STUART VARNEY (HOST): Could you live on $133 per month for food?

TANTAROS: I should try it because do you know how fabulous I’d look? I’d be so skinny. I mean, the camera adds ten pounds, it really does. I’d be looking great.

h/t Think Progress

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West made his announcement early this morning via media release. He later went on Fox & Friends for a more formal announcement.

via Politico

Florida Rep. Allen West — the tea party pugilist and face of the class of House Republicans that stormed to power two years ago — conceded Tuesday to 29-year-old construction executive Patrick Murphy in one of the nation’s highest-profile congressional races.

After two weeks of battle with St. Lucie County elections officials — and a recount of early votes that wound up extending Murphy’s lead — West acknowledged that he couldn’t surmount his 1,904-vote, or 0.58 percent, deficit. That difference was just outside the 0.5 percent threshold to automatically trigger a recount of all votes.

So the brash conservative opted to bow out rather than wage a long and costly court battle he was unlikely to win.

“For two weeks since Election Day, we have been working to ensure every vote is counted accurately and fairly. We have made progress towards that goal, thanks to the dedication of our supporters and their unrelenting efforts to protect the integrity of the democratic process,” West said in a statement to POLITICO.

“While many questions remain unanswered, today I am announcing that I will take no further action to contest the outcome of this election.”

West congratulated Murphy, saying, “I pray he will serve his constituents with honor and integrity, and put the interests of our nation before his own.”

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YouTube version

It's not often we see someone in the progressive media blast an establishment Democrat, and one with national aspirations, as completely and as thoroughly as Chris Hayes did this weelend with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

CHRIS HAYES: So what do we know that we didn’t know last week? We now know that Democrats cannot count on New York’s supposedly Democratic governor as an ally and every Democratic primary voter in the country should know that too. We already knew that in the run up to the election, Andrew Cuomo, whose aspirations for national office are well-known, did essentially nothing to aid the Democratic Party in its quest to take back the the State Senate from Republicans.

Hayes then lists some reasons to be wary of Cuomo, who he believes is putting his personal ambitions above his constituents wishes. The strange case of Simcha Felder, elected to the New York Senate as a Democrat but who recently announced he would caucus with Republicans instead, is for Hayes more damning evidence.

Despite the fact that he’s the leader of the Democratic Party in the state, and wishes someday to be the Democratic nominee for President, Cuomo has refused to intervene with Felder, saying he won’t insert himself into the controversy. Watching all this unfold, one can’t help but suspect Andrew Cuomo actually does not want a Democratic majority in the State Senate because a Republican majority gives him more of an opportunity to burnish his bipartisan compromiser bona fides before launching his presidential campaign. And much, much, much more insidiously, we suspect he doesn’t want a Democratic majority because said majority stands ready to pass a whole raft of incredibly important, ground-breaking progressive legislation, including public financing for elections, marijuana decriminalization and a minimum wage hike, among others. The governor says he favors all those policies, but in this case, he sure is not acting like it. We’re almost entirely sure that very soon Andrew Cuomo will be coming before many of the people watching this show, asking for your support in a Democratic primary race to be the next president. You should remember this remarkably cynical display when he does.

(h/t Politicker for the transcript.)

If, as expected, Cuomo does run in 2016 for the Democratic nomination he would likely be the leading candidate if Hillary Clinton doesn't run. He would also be able to raise a ton of money, far more than anyone else. And if Republicans can no longer win the presidency a moderate, business-friendly Democrat might suit them just fine.

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Mitt Romney continues to get hammered by Republicans for basically saying what a lot of them think, but doing so out loud and in public. This time it was Newt Gingrich's turn to get his shots in, with KLRU in Austin.

EVAN SMITH: So Governor Romney said yesterday now somewhat famously, that “the reason that the president won is because he gave gifts to minorities in the form of healthcare or to young people in the form of preferable college loan…”

NEWT GINGRICH: I am very disappointed…

EVAN SMITH: With Governor Romney saying that?

NEWT GINGRICH: With Governor Romney’s analysis, which I believe is insulting and profoundly wrong.

EVAN SMITH: Can you talk about that? Why is that?

NEWT GINGRICH: Well first of all, we didn’t lose Asian-Americans, because they got any gifts. He did worse with Asian-Americans than he did with Latinos.

EVAN SMITH: Right, seventy-three percent of Asian-Americans, seventy-one percent of Latinos.

NEWT GINGRICH: This is the hardest working and most successful ethnic group in America, okay. They ain’t into gifts. Second, it’s an insult to all Americans. It reduces us to economic entities who have no passion, no idealism, no dreams, no philosophy, and if it had been that simple, my question would have been “Why didn’t you out bid him?”

EVAN SMITH: Right, “You had the money…” you could be in the gift giving business if you had elected to be.

NEWT GINGRICH: He had enough billionaire supporters that if buying the electorate was the key, he could have got all of his super PAC friends together and said, “Don’t buy ads, give gifts.” It’d be like the northwest Indians who have gift giving ceremonies. He could have gone town by town and said, “Come here and let me give you gifts. Here are Republican gifts.” They could have an elephant coming in with gifts on it.

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The word irony doesn't do this justice.

h/t Buzzfeed

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This is one of those on-air goofs you figure when you hear about them someone was pulling your leg but this happened. Now, I'm already sick of this story of Petraeus's dalliances as anyone but as a comeuppance for the media obsession this is pretty damn funny.

From their website apology:

A mistake that aired on Denver's 7 has gone viral on the internet.

On 7NEWS at 5 p.m. on Monday, the station reported on ex-CIA director David Petraeus' relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

Broadwell earned a master's degree at the University of Denver and had given a speech at an alumni event several weeks ago that may have provided insight into the early stages of their relationship.

During the broadcast, 7NEWS showed an image of Broadwell's biography of Petraeus that is called, "All In: The Education of General David Petraeus."

However, when the 7NEWS reporter went on the Internet to get an image of the book cover, the reporter mistakenly grabbed a Photoshopped image that said, "All Up In My Snatch."

"It was a mistake," said KMGH-TV News Director Jeff Harris.

h/t John Aravosis, AmericaBlog

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Part of a news report from the day after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004. In Bush's first press conference he wasted no time saying what he'd do in his second term.

"This week the voters of America set the direction of our nation for the next four years," he said. "I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it."

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via The Young Turks

Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL.) explains why he’s completely against the Obama administration agreeing to a Grand Bargain with Republicans. “The Democratic should be united,” Grayson says. “We are the party that created social security. We are the party that created Medicare. We should stand behind it, and we should protect it. It’s amazingly popular among the voters. Why should we shoot ourselves in the head by saying we’re going to end these programs or even cut back these programs?”

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Conservative columnist David Frum had some choice words on Morning Joe for the industry that has swelled to basically steal money from republican voters.

Republicans have been fleeced, exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex...there are too many to name. Because the followers, the donors and the activists are so mistaken about the nature of the problems the country faces...just a simple question, and I went to Tea Party rallies and asked this question, have taxes gone up or down in recent years? They can't answer this question.

Frum declined to name names but he's more forthright in his ebook, Why Romney Lost. Frum is scathing in his criticism of the usual suspects (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh & talk radio, and many many more charlatans).

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Controversial Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia who ran unopposed in his deep red district was going to get re-elected but that didn't stop a lot of voters from expressing their displeasure with being represented by this type of person.

ATHENS, GA (CBS ATLANTA) - The elections may be over but the controversy continues for U.S. Rep. Paul Broun from district 10 in Athens. The Republican gained notoriety for comments he made on a YouTube video that said evolution and the Big Bang theory come "straight from the pit of hell."

Broun easily won re-election on Tuesday, but thousands of voters showed their displeasure with him by writing in their own candidates.

The election supervisor in Clarke County had never seen a write-in report as lengthy as the one she saw this year.

"I did not feel that I could in good faith vote for Mr. Broun," said voter Leslie Swann. "I wrote in a candidate of my choice."

"Who's that?" asked CBS Atlanta reporter Steve Kiggins.

"That would be the devil because I would vote for the devil himself before I would vote for that man," replied Swann.

Swann wasn't alone - nearly 4,000 people wrote in votes for the Origin of Species author, Charles Darwin.

But Darwin wasn't the only write-in candidate found on the ballots; Sesame Street's Big Bird made it a few times, and so did Comedy Central host Stephen Colbert. Also making the list was Eve Olution - plus one vote for Star Trek's Captain Sulu, George Takei.