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Asked in Philadelphia about the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to resign later this month, the high profile Catholic said: “I am not running.”

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So why is compromise so hard in the House? Some commentators, especially liberals, attribute it to what they say is the irrationality of Republican members of Congress.

But the answer could be this instead: individual members of Congress are responding fairly rationally to their incentives. Most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party. Instead, primary challenges, especially for Republicans, may be the more serious risk.

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The 2012 Election is over, but Republicans are still trying to analyze why their candidate did not win. Mitt Romney and the entire Republican Party were confident he would have a landslide win. Instead, he lost in some districts without even a single vote. There have been reports that 59 of Philadelphia’s voting districts came up with results that showed the GOP candidate Mitt Romney received not a single vote.

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Mark Newman of the University of Michigan has produced a map of the presidential election in which each county is colored red or blue depending on who won it.

It is pretty striking how many counties Romney won. It is also striking that Obama got 2.5 million more votes than Romney. If the blue counties are as blue as the red counties are red, that means that more people live in the small number of blue counties than in all the red ones combined. In other words, while there aren’t many blue counties, that’s where most of the people live. To give an example of this disparity, 3.8 million people live in the 469 square miles of the city of Los Angeles. This is half a million more people than the combined populations of Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, which together cover 1.6 million square miles. These four states are 3,400 times larger than Los Angeles but have appreciably fewer people. In other words, while the land area of the red counties is vastly greater than that of the blue counties, there are hardly any people living in many of them.

The map clearly shows Obama’s strengths: the Northeast, the upper Midwest, the West Coast, and the Colorado-New Mexico axis. There is also some strength in the South. In Southern Florida, Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are full of New York transplants who are strong Democrats. There is also a blue band that curves down from North Carolina. These care counties with large black populations.

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Two Republicans in separate states were taken into police custody during the past week for allegedly attempting to test how easy it would be to commit voter fraud.

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“The billionaire donors I hear are livid,” one Republican operative told The Huffington Post. “There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing.”

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Following a disappointing loss in his state’s U.S. Senate race to incumbent Claire McCaskill, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) told reporters Wednesday that he spent all of last night racking his brain and trying to figure out what had gone wrong with his campaign. “I don’t know what happened. I was polling really well until late August, but then it all just kind of unraveled,” said Akin, adding that he was “still piecing together” the causes of his collapse. “I just keep replaying those weeks and months over and over in my head, searching for something, anything, that I could have said or done differently, and absolutely nothing comes to mind. Maybe it was my views on tax reform that did me in. I don’t know.”

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While delivering his concession speech at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center Tuesday night, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney uttered the 240,000th and final lie of his 2012 campaign when he offered his “sincere congratulations” to President Barack Obama. “This has been a hard-fought and closely contested campaign, and while we’ve had our share of disagreements, there has always been a great deal of respect and admiration between myself and the president,” said Romney, concluding 17 months’ worth of manipulative falsehoods, half-truths, and outright fabrications with one last bald-faced lie. “Tonight, the American people made their voices heard. And now I urge every one of my supporters to set aside their differences with my opponent and join me in standing behind our president, so that we all may come together in a spirit of understanding and cooperation to build a better America.” Romney then concluded his speech by expressing his thanks for the tireless efforts of his campaign team, marking the 12th and final true statement of his nearly six-year-long White House run.

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A woman wearing an MIT t-shirt was barred from voting Florida, according to a local report. MIT stands for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

“A woman attempting to vote in West Boca Raton this morning was initially prohibited from entering the polling place because she was wearing a tee shirt with the letters MIT,” BocaNewsNow.com reports.

“BocaNewsNow.com has heard from multiple sources that an election supervisor at the polling place ultimately realized that MIT stands for “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” — a school where students tend to know how to spell — and was not a campaign shirt for the Republican candidate, who spells his name MITT. Campaigning is not permitted within several yards of a polling place.”

Amazing what two little servers can do with lighttpd as web server software. Pushing out about 100 mbps at times…

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Volunteers with True the Vote, a Tea Party group that claims it is trying to fight voter fraud by challenging the right of voters to vote, may have committed fraud themselves. Plunderbund, an Ohio-based political blog, reported Monday that members of the group attempted to sign up as poll observers in African American-heavy precincts in central Ohio, but may have forged signatures to do so.

While local candidates officials had authorized members of the group to serve as designated observers on forms filed in October, five of the six Franklin County candidates had withdrawn permission to use their signatures prior to the submission of this week’s forms. According to one candidate, the True the Vote volunteers simply “forged” her name onto the document — possibly a 5th degree felony.

As she watches the President from her tablet, kitchen television, and sits comfortably in her expensive home…. But to be fair, this is probably the poorest woman that Mitt Romney would agree to be associated with. I mean really, is that only a 19″ flatscreen in her Kitchen? For shame.

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here’s what doesn’t happen in other democracies:

Politicians of one party do not set voting schedules to favor their side and harm the other. Politicians do not move around voting places to gain advantages for themselves or to disadvantage their opponents. In fact, in almost no other country do politicians have any say in the administration of elections at all.

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In no other country, including federal systems such as Germany, Canada and Australia, does the citizen’s opportunity to vote depend on the affluence and competence of his or her local government.

In every other democracy, the vote is the means by which the people choose between the competing political parties — not one more weapon by which the parties compete.

The United States is an exceptional nation, but it is not always exceptional for good. The American voting system too is an exception: It is the most error-prone, the most susceptible to fraud, the most vulnerable to unfairness and one of the least technologically sophisticated on earth. After the 2000 fiasco, Americans resolved to do better. Isn’t it past time to make good on that resolution?

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Barack Obama owes more than I’d like him to owe to the Wall Street crowd. He probably at this point owes a little more than I’d like him to owe to the military. The rest he owes to the millions of people who elected him in 2008 – especially to those people whose enthusiasm I neither shared nor really understood – and he will owe them even more if they come out and pull his chestnuts out of the fire for him this time around. He may sell them out – and, yes, I understand if you wanted to add “again” to that statement – but they are not likely to revenge themselves against the country if he does and, even if they decided to, they don’t have the power to do much but yell at the right buildings.

On the other hand, Willard Romney owes even more to the Wall Street crowd, and he owes even more to the military, but he also owes everything he is politically to the snake-handlers and the Bible-bangers, to the Creationist morons and to the people who stalk doctors and glue their heads to the clinic doors, to the reckless plutocrats and to the vote-suppressors, to the Randian fantasts and libertarian fakers, to the closeted and not-so-closeted racists who have been so empowered by the party that has given them a home, to the enemies of science and to the enemies of reason, to the devil’s bargain of obvious tactical deceit and to the devil’s honoraria of dark, anonymous money, and, ultimately, to those shadowy places in himself wherein Romney sold out who he might actually be to his overweening ambition. It is a fearsome bill to come due for any man, let alone one as mendaciously malleable as the Republican nominee. Obama owes the disgruntled. Romney owes the crazy. And that makes all the difference.

It’s easy for most people to remember things that they’ve said because they’re consistent with what they’d say now, in that they’re based on actual beliefs or opinions we hold. If our positions switch in light of new information, those are major world-view-changing events, and it’s easy to remember those turning points.

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The Columbus Free Press is reporting that the Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted allegedly ordered for “experimental software patches” to be installed on vote-counting machines in a number of Ohio counties.

According to the newspaper, voting rights activists are concerned that the software patches, which are usually used to update or change existing software, could potentially affect over 4 million registered voters, including those who live in Columbus and Cleveland.

Ohio law allows for the experimental use of voting equipment as long as it’s restricted to a limited number of precincts, and under the experimental label, equipment can legally be used without certification.

Of course. What could possibly go wrong?

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Mitt Romney was really concerned that his “Storm Relief Event” in Kettering, Ohio yesterday would look like a dud, so he and his team stocked their donation tables with $5,000 worth of supplies at Walmart. The props, according to Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins, were things like granola bars, canned food, and diapers which were strategically placed to make sure that the photographs taken at Romney’s “Storm Relief” campaign didn’t a show very un-busy, un-stocked relief table (what else do you expect when you give people short notice to donate their canned goods?). But … but … look at how pretty all those fake donations look:

And apparently, the event was so manufactured that they allowed supporters to use the donations which were bought by the campaign, to donate back to the campaign.

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Ever since I revealed Mitt Romney’s 47 percent rant, tips and tapes have come through the transom—including this and this. And another source who asked not to be identified just sent me an audio recording of a private Mitt Romney fundraiser from earlier this year. At this event, Romney didn’t decry half of the nation, but he and Ann Romney each expressed disdain for President Barack Obama, with the Republican presidential candidate asserting that Obama considers businesspeople “a necessary evil” and his wife suggesting that the president was not a “grown-up.”