Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The HIll: Rep. Nancy Pelosi announced Wednesday that she will stay on as House Democratic leader in the next Congress.

DailyCaller.com: By 6:00 a.m. EST Wednesday, more than 675,000 digital signatures appeared on 69 separate secession petitions covering all 50 states, according to a Daily Caller analysis of requests lodged with the White House’s “We the People” online petition system.

WorldNetDaily: U.S. Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., calls a mysterious 4,000-vote swing late on Election Night “unconscionable” as he continues his fight to challenge his razor-thin apparent loss to Democrat Patrick Murphy.

It’s one thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to dominate a Democratic city like Philadelphia, but check out this head-spinning figure: In 59 voting divisions in the city, Mitt Romney received not one vote. Zero. Zilch.

PolicyMic: To date, citizens of 18 states have petitioned the White House for consideration of a peaceful withdrawal from the United States. That’s right, thousands of Americans have already signed petitions at whitehouse.gov asking President Obama to allow them to peacefully secede from the union.

AZFamily.com: Thousands of Arizonans have signed a petition calling for the state to secede from the Union. The petition, filed online through the White House’s petition page, shows that Arizona, along with several other states, is calling for secession to leave the United States and start its own new government.

The Hill: On Friday morning, Louisiana Rep. John Fleming (R) issued a statement urging Boehner to “talk with House Republicans before making pledges on the national news.”

The Hill: Limbaugh played “Feliz Navidad” on his show Friday and argued Hispanics are moving to Democrats not because of immigration but because of the party’s positions on taxes and welfare. Allowing those in the United States illegally to stay wouldn’t help the party, he argued.

ABC: The petition to “Peacefully grant the State of Texas to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government,” was submitted on Friday of last week. Just three days later, it zoomed past the 25,000 mark at 3:22 p.m. today and kept going.

NY Times: Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them.

The Courier: The X-Mart Adult Superstore in Clarksville can challenge the validity and constitutionality of that city’s ordinance regulating sexually oriented businesses, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday. | 40 Retail Corporation v. City of Clarkville

The New American: A once reliable friend of the Obama administration is becoming its frequent foe. On Wednesday, the day after President Obama was reelected, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) leaned on the president to keep one of the first promises he made after being elected in 2008.

Ted McAllister at Public Discourse: Can the press still prevent a tyrannical majority opinion as it did in Tocqueville’s time? Second of a two-part series.

Yahoo News (Reuters): Nearly half of Britons would vote in a referendum to leave the European Union and less than a third to stay in, according to a poll highlighting divisions facing Prime Minister David Cameron.

Heather MacDonald at National Review: Hispanics will prove to be even more decisive in the victory of Governor Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30, which raised upper-income taxes and the sales tax, than in the Obama election. And California is the wave of the future. A March 2011 poll by Moore Information found that Republican economic policies were a stronger turn-off for Hispanic voters in California than Republican positions on illegal immigration. Twenty-nine percent of Hispanic voters were suspicious of the Republican party on class-warfare grounds . . .

The Hill: “Conservatives and Tea Partiers are just sick and tired of Republican leaders compromising on the state and national level with Democrats that grow the size of government,” Viguerie said. “We are going to hold their feet to the fire.”

AP: A federal judge has blocked part of a voter-approved ballot initiative related to human trafficking, until a court hearing can be held later this month. The decision temporarily halts a provision of Proposition 35 that requires registered sex offenders to give authorities a list of their Internet providers and screen names. The initiative, passed Tuesday with 81 percent support, toughens penalties on those convicted of human trafficking.

Washington Times: He added, “You cannot have a budgetary solution if you do not change what the role of government should be. As long as you think we have to please the world and run this welfare state, all we will argue about is who will get the loot.”

AP: In the end, President Barack Obama won re-election exactly the way his campaign had predicted: running up big margins with women and minorities, mobilizing a sophisticated registration and get-out-the-vote operation, and focusing narrowly on the battleground states that would determine the election.

Juan Williams at Wall Street Journal: The critical political message from President Obama’s re-election victory Tuesday is that he cemented a new coalition of Democrats, led by the Latino vote, which threatens to reduce Republicans to an afterthought in future national elections. Yes, Mr. Obama won with the same group of voters—Hispanics, blacks, Asians, young people and educated women—that brought him to power in 2008 . . . Demography is political destiny and today Democrats have the numbers to prove it.

Ted McAllister at Public Discourse: We are witnessing, I believe, the collapse of a great modern project. The goal of this project was to form a democratic public, led by the most talented leaders and administered by enlightened public servants, but constituted by a deeply informed, engaged, and public-spirited citizenry. To produce such citizens, journalists served an almost sacred role of supplying all the disparate members of the public with “disinterested” information. Without information and knowledge, democratic deliberations are impossible, and without such deliberations there is no substantive “public,” only congeries of individuals and groups.

National Review: Florida congressman Allen West trails his Democratic challenger Patrick Murphy by .8 percent and, though Murphy has declared victory, West isn’t conceding. West is behind by a margin greater than the .5 percent required to trigger a recount, but he is demanding one nonetheless, citing vote-counting irregularities.

Huffington Post: Tuesday’s elections brought two historic firsts for religion in American politics: A Buddhist senator and a Hindu representative — both from Hawaii — will join Congress. Democrat Mazie Hirono beat former Gov. Linda Lingle (R), making Hirono the first Buddhist in the Senate.

Blog of the Legal Times: How much restitution is a victim of child pornography entitled to? That’s the tough question before U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in Washington.

Victor David Hanson at National Review: Conservatives are divided, acrimoniously so, over three schools of explaining The Defeat . . . 1. The Near Fatalists . . . 2. The Should’ve, Could’ve, Would’ve What If-ers . . . 3. The Big Tenters.

AP: Los Angeles County voters have approved a measure requiring porn performers to wear condoms while filming sex scenes . . .

CNBC: Boehner said House Republicans are asking Obama “to make good on a balanced approach” that would including spending cuts and address government social benefit programs.

CNSNews: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on Wednesday that if the $16.394 current legal limit on the federal government’s debt must be raised in the next few months by another $2.4 trillion, “We’ll raise it.”

National Journal: Based on racial exit-poll data available from select states, Obama would have definitively lost 12 states to Republican nominee Mitt Romney if only white voters mattered. Add another three possible toss-up states and that’s a full 242 possible electoral votes that Obama would not have.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Don’t be afraid of raising taxes to rescue the budget. In Tuesday’s election, 54 percent of California voters approved Proposition 30, a $6 billion tax hike that staves off dire spending cuts. If the measure had failed, trigger reductions would have forced schools and community colleges to trim their budgets by $5.3 billion and made the state’s colleges and universities cut $500 million.

The AP carries the text.

WorldNetDaily: Tea-party advocate U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., was declared the winner by the Associated Press with 98 percent of precincts reporting. She led Democratic Farm Labor Party millionaire Jim Graves, by just over 3,000 votes out of nearly 350,000 votes . . .

AP: A slim majority of Puerto Ricans sought to change their ties with the United States and become the 51st U.S. state in a non-binding referendum that would require final approval from Congress.

FoxBusiness.com: Equities, commodities and other risky assets tumbled on Wednesday after U.S. elections left Washington, D.C. as sharply divided as before as the fiscal cliff looms large.

R.J. Snell at Public Discourse: Naïve proponents and skeptics of the natural law often point to the world “out there” as the source of objective truth (or lack thereof), but the truths of the natural law are to be found through the actions of our intellect.

AP: Democrats strengthened their hold on the Senate but failed Tuesday to recapture the majority in the House of Representatives they lost two years ago.

Politico reports.

The Hill: Democrats will retain control of the Senate next year, having held on to enough of their endangered seats along with picking up three currently Republican seats.

Politico: Here’s a round-up of the House and Senate incumbents who have lost their races. All races have been called by the Associated Press.

Politico: “I think this is premature,” he added. “We’ve got a quarter of the vote. Now remember, here is the thing about Ohio. A third of the vote or more is cast early and is won overwhelmingly by the Democrats. It’s counted first and then you count the election day and the question is, by the time you finish counting the election day does it overcome that early advantage that Democrats have built up in early voting, particularly in Cuyahoga County.”
Rove said the network needs to be “careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count. Even if they have made it on the basis of select precincts, I’d be very cautious about intruding in this process.”

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: Yet whoever wins today, it is hard to be sanguine about the future. The demographic and economic realities do not permit it.

The Hill: “DoD’s failure to fix this longstanding problem means that the blank ballots of thousands of overseas service members, as well as some who have recently returned from overseas, could be currently trapped in an archaic and inefficient mail forwarding system,” the senators wrote. “These ballots are unlikely to reach these service members until after Election Day has passed.”

Blog of the Legal Times: The technological restraints imposed against Legg, convicted in an online child exploitation sting, are at the center of a case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Legg is serving a 30-month prison. His lawyer today urged the appeals court to find that the restrictions go too far.

The Hill: Union officials are campaigning to lock collective bargaining rights into Michigan’s state constitution on Election Day and are talking about repeating the feat elsewhere if they succeed.

The Hill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warned Mitt Romney this week that upper-chamber Democrats would be no rubber stamp for Republican ideals if the GOP contender wins the White House next Tuesday.

Bloomberg: New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an independent, issued a surprise endorsement of President Obama’s re-election Thursday, pointing to the president’s belief in global warming.

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal: You’ve heard about Mitt Romney’s problems with the women’s vote, the black vote, the Hispanic vote, the union vote and the young Democrats vote. But there’s one major voting group that’s fallen off the map since the primaries. The evangelical vote.

NCPA Policy Digest: Crony capitalism describes an economic system in which the profitability of firms in a market economy is dependent on political connections. Despite the coverage in popular press, little academic research has been devoted to researching the causes and effects of crony capitalism, says Randall G. Holcombe, professor of economics at Florida State University.

CNSNews: The federal government spent enough money on federal means-tested welfare programs to have sent each impoverished household a check for nearly $60,000, according to figures from the Census Bureau and the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

AP reports.

AP reports.

The Examiner: New polls released over the last 72 hours from Senate races in Massachusetts, Missouri Virginia, and Wisconsin all give Democrats a good chance to keep control of the Senate. Nate Silver’s probability analysis for all ten races, which was updated just today, favors the Democrats in seven out of the ten races listed below.

LifeNews: “Romney currently leads Obama 52 percent to 45 percent among voters who say they have already cast their ballots,” Gallup reported.

NCPA Digest: The recent economic crisis has left many state and local governments with underfunded pension benefits for government employees. However, elected officials are unwilling to make the necessary cuts or tax hikes because both options are extremely unpopular, say Robert Novy-Marx, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, and Joshua Rauh, a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

TNR.com: But the contest in question is anything but. While Republicans have slowly gained control of state legislative bodies across the South, only one Southern state has maintained a legislature fully controlled by the once-dominant Democrats. In November, however, the Arkansas Republican Party—after decades of haplessness—may well take control of the General Assembly. The tight race explains why Koch bothers money is flowing into a measly local legislative election.

George F. Will at Human Events: WASHINGTON – The election eve mood is tinged with sadness stemming from well-founded fear that America’s new government is subverting America’s old character. Barack Obama’s agenda is a menu of temptations intended to change the nation’s social norms by making Americans comfortable with the degradation of democracy. This degradation consists of piling up public debt that binds unconsenting future generations to finance current consumption.

CATO Institute (pdf link available to the full report): Four governors were awarded an “A” in this report card—Sam Brownback of Kansas, Rick Scott of Florida, Paul LePage of Maine, and Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania. Five governors were awarded an “F”—Pat Quinn of Illinois, Dan Malloy of Connecticut, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, and Chris Gregoire of Washington.

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: Floyd Corkins, the volunteer at a gay-rights organization who attempted to commit mass murder at the Christian conservative Family Research Council (FRC) because of FRC’s stance on social and religious issues, has been indicted on charges of domestic terrorism. It is the first such indictment ever handed down by a grand jury in the nation’s capital.

Reuters: A unanimous three-judge panel said Congress, in a law dating from 1968, adopted the sales ban to help curb violent crime. It also said that the nation’s founders and 19th-century courts and commentators believed that disarming specific groups did not trample on the right to bear arms. | NRA v. BATF, No. 11-109509

NY Times: His name is Bernard von NotHaus, and he is a professed “monetary architect” and a maker of custom coins found guilty last spring of counterfeiting charges for minting and distributing a form of private money called the Liberty Dollar.

The Church Report: Virginia man accused of shooting a security guard inside the headquarters of a conservative Christian lobbying group was indicted on a local terrorism charge, marking the first time in a decade that a person has been prosecuted under the statute, prosecutors said Wednesday.

AP: If Obama releases his college and passport records by the end of October, the New York real estate mogul and reality show host says he will contribute $5 million to a charity of the president’s choice.

CBS: The vast majority of homemade pornography and private images on personal computers ends up on public websites called “parasites.”
Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study from Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found. | Internet Watch Foundation press release

CNBC: As president, he will receive $191,300 annually for life — win or lose in next month’s election — and receives a travel allotment as well as mailing privileges.

Daily Caller: The government spent approximately $1.03 trillion on 83 means-tested federal welfare programs in fiscal year 2011 alone — a price tag that makes welfare that year the government’s largest expenditure, according to new data released by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee.

Opposing Views: Strip club owners sued Houston, claiming the city is unconstitutionally taxing them $5 per customer to fund the city’s backlog on processing of rape kits.

Rasmussen: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 66% of Likely U.S. Voters believe voter fraud is a serious problem in America today, with 33% who say it is a Very Serious one. Twenty-eight percent (28%) disagree, but that includes just 12% who say it’s Not At All Serious.

Mark Bauerlein at Public Discourse: Conservatives need a literary tradition that matches Russell Kirk’s political tradition in The Conservative Mind; Robert Oscar López’s new book is a pioneer in this effort.

The Hill: The Supreme Court said Tuesday that early voting can proceed in Ohio — a major win for President Obama.

CNBC: “I’ve been in this business a long time and believe me there is essentially no difference from one administration to another no matter what the platforms,” said Paul, a former hopeful for the GOP nomination. “The foreign policy stays the same, the monetary policy stays the same, there’s no proposal for any real cuts and both parties support it.”

NCPA Policy Digest: Since its inception, Social Security was intended to be financed by the contribution of workers and not through general revenues. But lawmakers have become less willing to tax workers at the level required to finance rising benefit costs, which culminated in the decision to reduce Social Security’s principal financing stream — the payroll tax — for economic stimulus and to turn formally to general revenues to subsidize the program, says Charles Blahous, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and public trustee for Medicare and Social Security.

The Mississippi Press: A state lottery could be debated in the Mississippi Legislature next year if the issue gets past the House Gaming Committee, headed by a Gulf Coast lawmaker.

Wall Street Journal: President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.

The Hill: A pair of top Senate Republicans is pressing the Treasury Department for details on when the government will reach its $16.4 trillion debt ceiling — and how long it can avoid hitting the limit.

Reuters: Alaska state employees can use private email accounts for public business but the messages must be preserved under public-records laws, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled on Friday in a case stemming from ex-Governor Sarah Palin’s communications practices. | Link to more reports and the ruling at How Appealing