Midday open thread

• Dems did pretty well in North Dakota last Tuesday.
• The day after the election, Obama was +8 job approval with Rasmussen. Nearly a week later, Obama is up +17.
• Republican Sen. Mel Martinez, on MTP, notes that his party's xenophobic tendencies could doom it into the future.

  The fact of the matter is that Hispanics are going to be a more and more vibrant part of the electorate, and the Republican Party had better figure out how to talk to them. We had a very dramatic shift between what President Bush was able to do with Hispanic voters, where he won 44 percent of them, and what happened to Senator McCain. Senator McCain did not deserve what he got. He was one of those that valiantly fought, fought for immigration reform, but there were voices within our party, frankly, which if they continue with that kind of rhetoric, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, that so much of it was heard, we're going to be relegated to minority status.

• Obama team is working on plan to close down Guantanamo Bay prison.
• From an email press release -- MSNBC has given Keith Olbermann a new four-year contract. Congrats to Keith!
• Palin gets her own dictionary definitions.

  1. An applicant lacking even basic job skills

  2. Someone supremely un-self-aware or lacking any relative sense of what he/she does or doesn't know.

  HR sent me another Palin for the marketing manager job.

• More props for Nate Silver. And yes, he was always a numbers freak:

  He “was a numbers fanatic,” said his father, Brian Silver, a political science professor at Michigan State University.

  “When we took him to preschool one time, we dropped him off, and he announced, ‘Today, I’m a numbers machine,’ and started counting,” Brian Silver said. “When we picked him up two and a half hours later, he was ‘Two thousand one hundred and twenty-two, two thousand one hundred and twenty-three...’ ”

  By kindergarten, he could multiply two-digit numbers in his head. By 11, he was conducting multivariate analysis to figure out if the size of a baseball stadium affects attendance (it doesn’t). By age 13, he was using statistics to manage a fantasy baseball team. When his parents refused to buy him computer games, he taught himself the Basic programming language and created his own.

• Damn right we're looking at Texas for 2012.
• Damn right. Treat DC as one big crime scene.
• Minnesota remains the good government/good citizen state, with 77.9% of eligible voters showing up at the polls. My home state CT seems like a bunch of slackers at  67.1 (make us a battleground and see what happens), but then there's W VA at 50.3 to make me feel better.  - DemFromCT
• Secret Service code names are often thought to be revealing of a president's character, so if you're expecting big changes, you might be pleased that the code name for President-elect Obama is Renegade. The rest of the new first family gets matching "R" names: Michelle Obama is "Renaissance," Malia is "Radiance" and little Sasha is "Rosebud."  How does Obama's name compare with his predecessors'? Bill Clinton was "Eagle." George H.W. Bush was "Timberwolf." Ronald Reagan was "Rawhide." Jimmy Carter was "Deacon."

  As for George W. Bush, his code name is "Tumbler." Whether that's from his problem with Segways, mountain bikes, or pretzels, only the Secret Service knows for sure. - Devilstower

• Burnt Orange Report's David Mauro is the only progressive blogger in line for a $10,000 blogging scholarship. Go vote for him.