Karl Rove vs. math

Fox News analyst and GOP rainmaker Karl Rove went to war on election night against his own network’s arithmetic.
NBC and Fox called Obama’s re-election at around 11:15PM ET; after Fox called Ohio (and, accordingly, the election) for the President, Rove started complaining—on Fox News!—that Fox had called it prematurely.

James Poniewozik in TIME:

“Do you believe that Ohio has been settled?” Chris Wallace asked him. “No, I don’t,” Rove said, adding that he had the director of the Romney Ohio campaign on the phone. “I would be very cautious of intruding in this process.” But Rove was not cautious of intruding in Fox’s independent election-calling process. Fox, like many networks, keeps a separate “decision desk” of analysts to make calls on states independent of influence by anchors and on-air talent. It’s not unusual to call states, even if there’s only a small gap in the reported vote, on the basis of what they know about the vote yet to come in. (And as it turns out, they were absolutely right.)

What is unusual–really, one of the most spectacular things I have ever seen on cable news–is for one arm of a network to basically turn against itself on-air. “Here’s what we’re going to do!” said anchor Bret Baier. “We’re going to get someone from the decision desk and we’re going to bring them in here and we’re going to have them on air and we’re going to interview them about this decision.”

More at TIME.

And, Salon breaks it down play by play for those too skeeved out to watch the video.

Most disturbing of all, Karl Rove was fondling his Mac.