One of the more remarkable things wrought by the election was a serious reckoning with reality in some corners of the Republican party. Sometimes numbers and facts are irrefutable—sometimes when you lose you can no longer credibly scream victory in the face of defeat, as Karl Rove tried to do in his now-famous election night meltdown ranting against Fox News’s own statisticians.

Rove may still be in denial, but Fox News for their part is facing reality and moving on. “The election’s over,” a Fox spokesman told NY Mag, and with it a directive apparently straight from Fox News top dog Roger Ailes that Rove is no longer to be booked without first obtaining permission.

From New York Mag:

He wants the faces associated with the election off the air — for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign — Ailes’s orders mean new rules. Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking Rove or Morris. Both pundits made several appearances in the days after the election, but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly.

Some high profile Republicans are facing the music and changing with the times, like Charlie Spies, who founded the biggest Romney SuperPAC this year and immediately after the election shifted priorities for 2016 with a new SuperPAC called Republicans for Immigration Reform.

John Boehner and current House Republicans doen’t seem to be joining in—their stance in the fiscal cliff negotiation is that the election changed nothing. But if Obama holds the line and waits for the incoming class to replace some outgoing Representatives in January he may find a more receptive audience. When even Fox News is changing, you know it’s time to get with the program.