Barack Obama Wins Second Term; Opportunities To Say "I Told You So" Immediately Present Themselves

County by county results of 2012 Presidential Election with red indicating counties that went with Romney and blue indicating counties that went for Obama.

Despite earlier indications to the contrary, the American electorate had apparently decided to double down on the previous four years of failure and re-elect Barack Hussein Obama to a second term. And I do have to use some sort of qualifier here not only because of widespread military disenfranchisement as well as election-day dirty tricks in some cities, but also some swing state counties having voter turnout as high as 111%.

It should probably go without saying that I was extremely shocked and disappointed in the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election. However, science fiction author and Mormon Democrat Orson Scott Card probably summed it up better than I ever could.

Of course, it didn't take long for harsh reality to rear its ugly head. On Wall Street in the days leading up to the election, there was talk of the markets rebounding regardless of who won because it removed 'uncertainty' from the longer-term picture, that turned out to be only partially true as the Dow-Jones plunged 369 points in a single day. Shares in finance and defense companies took a beating, but not nearly as bad as coal stocks. Since election day, shares of Arch Coal [NYSE: ACI] have dropped 14.78%, Oxford Natural Resources [NYSE: OXF] declined in value by more than 22% and shares of James River Coal [NASDAQ: JRCC] have lost 42.77% of their value.

Curously, the media decided to rediscover the 'fiscal cliff' and debt ceiling issues about one day after the election- issues the Romney/Ryan campaign had demonstrated they were at least capable of taking seriously while President Obama went on Letterman and denied there was even a debt problem. Some media types simply attributed the stock market freefall to uncertainty over the looming fiscal cliff.

Hardly 24 hours after Obama declared victory, a number of companies including Boeing, Energizer, Research in Motion, Lightyear Networks, Hawker Beechcraft, the Providence Journal, UtahAmerican Energy and Corning had announced a fresh round of layoffs while Olive Garden and Red Lobster parent company Darden and grocery chain Kroeger stated they were cutting workers' hours in anticipation of a number of 0bamacare provisions going into effect. A number of smaller businesses had reportedly trimmed their full time staff to under 50 employees so they could remain exempt from 0bamacare.

Financial consultants and industry observers also note that most of the smaller local and regional banks in the USA are set to disappear now that Dodd-Frank is here to stay for the forseeable future, leaving behind a number of the larger 'too big to fail' financial institutions that were bailed out with taxpayer money in 2008.

Of course, why should the bad news be limited to the economy and markets? On Friday afternoon, CIA Director David Petraeus announced his resignation, citing an ongoing extramarital affair. Interestingly, I heard this news being broken over CNBC, who claimed their parent network's Andrea Mitchell broke the story [given the close working relationship between the Obama campaign and NBC network's, I wouldn't doubt if she was handed the scoop in exchange for running interference on the Administration's behalf while on the campaign trail- NANESB!]. The affair reportedly came to light when Pretraeus' mistress sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to the CIA director who in turned reported the threatining messages to the FBI. Coincidentally, Petraeus was scheduled to testify before a Senate hearing on the September 11th terrorist attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi.

To hardly anybody's surprise, Petraeus' indiscrecions were made known to the White House by the FBI well before the election, but the White House reportedly held off on forcing him out until after November 6th- much to the chagrin of the FBI.

Keep in mind, all that wonderful news came within 48 hours of the election. If the Obama Administration can cram this much scandal and bad news into a timeframe of just under two days, imagine what could happen with four years.