Two op-ed pieces but fairly sound.
SauceSean Hannity, John Boehner say GOP Should Tackle Immigration Reform
By Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 1 hr 37 mins ago.........
Well, that was fast.
Just two days after President Barack Obama sailed to re-election over Mitt Romney, boosted by more than 70 percent of the Latino vote, some Republicans are striking a new tone on illegal immigration.
Conservative Fox News and radio host Sean Hannity said Thursday that his views on immigration have "evolved." Hannity continued:
We've gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It's simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don't say you gotta go home. And that is a position that I've evolved on. Because you know what—it just—it's gotta be resolved. The majority of people here—if some people have criminal records you can send 'em home—but if people are here, law-abiding, participating, four years, their kids are born here ... first secure the border, pathway to citizenship ... then it's done. But you can't let the problem continue. It's gotta stop.
Meanwhile, in an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer, House Speaker John Boehner said he is "confident" the two parties can agree to a deal on immigration.
"This issue has been around far too long," Boehner said. "A comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I'm confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all."
Just two years ago, Boehner said it was worth considering amending the U.S. Constitution to end birthright citizenship, because he said it might discourage people from illegally crossing the border.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who supports immigration reform, said on CBS on Friday that Republicans had sent "mixed messages" about immigration. "On the immigration issue, which turned out to be very important, and some issues about women, too, some mixed messages were sent," she said.
The party has been searching for answers about why Mitt Romney lost what seemed like a very winnable election. Many within the party have pointed to the GOP's demographics problem: Romney lost every group except for white voters, which is a shrinking portion of the electorate. Latinos this year made up 10 percent of all voters, according to the national exit poll, a share that will only grow each election. Like other groups, Latino voters care most about jobs and the economy, but 35 percent of them listed immigration reform as their top issue in a poll conducted by Latino Decisions.
Latino voter and advocacy groups have said they expect both Obama and congressional Republicans to work together to pass immigration reform in 2013.
Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, told reporters that Latino voters had sent a message to Obama. "We expect leadership on comprehensive immigration reform in 2013," he said. "To both sides we say: 'No more excuses.'"
SauceRepublicans Search for Answers About What Went Wrong in the Election
By Chris Moody, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 21 hrs ago
Seeking answers to why their presidential candidate lost the election, the first round of consensus on the right has focused on the Republican need to recalibrate its message to connect with the nation's shifting voting demographics—or, at the very least, acknowledge that the country is changing.
The search for answers about What Went Wrong began almost immediately on election night, a signal that some had already been mulling the possibility of a loss for some time.
"Two obvious lessons so far: It's a different country demographically. And mediocre candidates lose elections," Tucker Carlson, a Fox News contributor and editor in chief of the Daily Caller, posted on Twitter on Tuesday night. He went on to write an essay with Daily Caller publisher Neil Patel, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, about the Republicans' failed attempt to take back the White House.
"The country is changing too fast," Carlson and Patel wrote in their election postmortem. "Most people have the sense that America is different demographically from what it was 20 years ago. But unless they've been reading the latest census data, they have no real idea. The changes are that profound. They're also permanent and likely to accelerate. In order to remain competitive outside Utah, the GOP will have to win new voters, and soon."
According to early data from Election Day, a whopping 75 percent of Latino voters voted for President Barack Obama, an increase from 2008, when the group chose Obama over Sen. John McCain 67 to 31 percent. Obama was also successful among Asian-American voters, who supported the president over Mitt Romney 73 to 26 percent. As expected, Obama won more than 90 percent of the black vote.
"Romney made a conscious decision to blow off Hispanic voters," wrote Red State editor Erick Erickson. "Yes conservatives, we must account for this. The Romney campaign to the Hispanic community was atrocious and, frankly, the fastest growing demographic in America isn't going to vote for a party that sounds like that party hates brown people. That does not mean the GOP must offer up amnesty. It does mean that a group that is a natural fit for the GOP on social issues, must in someway be made to feel comfortable with the GOP."
Long before Tuesday's election, there was a realization among Republicans that the coalitions the party had built and benefited from in years past would no longer be strong enough to win national elections.
"We're nonstarters with these groups. That's what's wrong. It's an unsustainable coalition," former Virginia Republican Rep. Tom Davis told reporters during a breakfast meeting in September. "We've got to be an open, welcoming party and recognize that we're going to have to broaden our coalition to start winning elections. We are a regional party now.
"If you can't win in these circumstances, what do you do when things are good?" Davis added.
The lack of outreach to minority voters stretched back into the primaries. While Republicans, for instance, campaigned for primary votes in Michigan, a state with the highest concentration of Muslim and Arab Americans, Ron Paul was the only candidate to reach out to those communities. The rest, including Romney, declined to put forth much of an effort. The Republican debates, in which Romney sought to outflank his opponents by tilting to their right on immigration, also may have hurt the Republican candidate among Latinos, who remembered the positions he took only a few months earlier.
Romney himself seemed to realize that Republicans faced a challenge of an expanding Democratic electorate, but he did not seem eager to make efforts to reach it. His secretly recorded comments at an off-the -record fundraiser last spring, in which he told a group of donors that it would be impossible for him to convince "47 percent" of the country to vote for him, were indicative of this fear, which was spreading through the Republican Party.
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney told donors at the time, although the recording of his comments were not made public until Mother Jones magazine unearthed them in September. "All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
Others on the right blamed the loss on Romney's lack of conservative credentials. Despite referring to himself during the primaries as "severely conservative," Romney was, after all, a former governor of a liberal blue state with a moderate record. Republicans aligned with the tea party, many of whom held their noses to support Romney over Obama, lashed out at the party for choosing a candidate they never fully supported in the first place.
"What we got was a weak, moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country club establishment wing of the Republican Party," said Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin at a postelection press conference in Washington.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who warned Republicans about supporting what he called a "Massachusetts moderate" during his primary campaign against Romney, called on Republicans to be more inclusive in their voter outreach methods.
"The question is do they want to, in a disciplined way, create a schedule and a program and include people who are not traditionally Republican?" Gingrich said during a Wednesday interview on CNN's "Starting Point With Soledad O'Brien." "The difference between outreach and inclusion, is outreach is when five white guys have a meeting and call you," he continued. "Inclusion is when you're in the meeting."
I don't know how the core of the party feels about interracial marriage though. 
His wife is a media lawyer however, she'll know how to handle things in the media.
