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Vote fraud is no big deal, right? It hardly ever happens. It’s so rare that it’s not even worth discussing. Anyone who claims to take the integrity of our ballots seriously is cynically exploiting phantom fears for the purpose of suppressing the Democrat-loving minority vote.

To keep that silly narrative alive, it’s important not to read the Sunday edition of the Columbus Dispatch, in which readers were informed that “more than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.”

Furthermore, “in two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting age population: Northwestern Ohio’s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it’s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.”

31 more counties report over 90 percent voter registration, which is a good 20 percent higher than the national average. The Buckeye State sure is civic-minded! Well, except that 1.6 million of the 7.8 million registered voters in the state haven’t voted in at least four years. So I guess they were civic minded, once upon a time. Never fear – I’m sure plenty of those “inactive” voters will reactivate themselves just in time for Barack Obama’s re-election.

You might think these astonishing statistics indicate a crisis-level voter registration problem requiring immediate attention, particularly since this is 2012, not 1912, and modern technology gives us extremely potent tools for accurately managing massive amounts of data. But Attorney General Eric Holder disagrees. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted sent Holder a letter back in February, warning that “common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls… I simply cannot accept that.” Husted said existing federal regulations “limit Ohio’s ability to remove ineligible names, thereby increasing the chance for voter fraud.”

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House Speaker John Boehner offered Wednesday to pursue a deal with a victorious President Barack Obama that will include higher taxes “under the right conditions” to help reduce the nation’s staggering debt and put its finances in order.

“Mr. President, this is your moment,” Boehner told reporters, speaking about the “fiscal cliff” that will hit in January. “We want you to lead.”

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.

“Let’s find the common ground that has eluded us,” Boehner said while congratulating the president on winning a second term.

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Vast social revolutions and wars are often preceded by periods of giving up on reforms, despairing withdrawal from public life by the best and brightest, and even peacefulness which seems to have become the normal condition in spite of deep conflicts and growing crises beneath the surfaces of public life. Often, earlier periods of intense conflicts and crises have been overcome and resolved, so it comes to look like that is the normal in life. This lulls most people into assuming their worse fears cannot happen, but this leads them to lowering their guards against growing conflicts and crises, so small ones can more easily cascade down into massive ones. If people expected they could become vast wars or revolutions or implosions, they would take more precautions to prevent that. But when lulled in expecting the worst cannot happen, the worst than they could ever imagine often explodes suddenly.

The cataclysmic French Revolution came after many decades of attempted reforms and conflicts which people had come to think of as unending. It started with new attempts at reforms, then incidents that did not seem so important, then all of it a sudden it exploded. WWI came after so many decades of peace in Europe, in spite of imperial conflicts around the world and an arms race, that most people thought a major war was impossible. Then a single murder in the far away Balkans set in motion an explosive cascade of events that led to a cataclysmic war. The Russian Revolution was preceded by such a long “lull” encouraged by European peace and reforms by the tsar that even Lenin was near despair and was living abroad. After several years of WWI and growing poverty at home, the Russian front imploded and a small event at home triggered a revolution that started small and democratic and then exploded into one of the vastest social revolutions in history. The beginning of WWII on the crucial German-French front was so quiet for so many months after France and Britain had declared war on Germany after it invaded Poland that it was called the “Sitzen Krieg” in Germany, the sit-down war, then it exploded as Germany invaded through the Ardennes. This was repeated near the end of the war as Germany built up its forces secretly for attacking through the Ardennes again.

The American Revolution looked very unlikely until that fateful British march to Concord and Lexington to enforce gun control laws. Then it exploded. The conflicts between the North and South had been so intense for so many decades, off and on, and then resolved again and again by major compromises that the Ante-Bellum period of the 1850′s seemed another replay of that scenario. Then all of a sudden there was a small incident near Charleston, moves to secession, calling up the Northern troops and an explosion of war vastly more ghastly than Americans imagined possible. War between Japan and Germany and the U.S. had been put off so many times and so long that Pearl Harbor came as quite a shock to most Americans. The 9/11 attacks on the U.S. were just as shocking all over again.

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

The two-part referendum asked whether the island wanted to change its 114-year relationship with the United States and nearly 54 percent sought to change it, while 46 percent favored the status quo with ninety-six percent of precincts reporting.

The second question asked voters to choose from three options, with statehood by far the favorite, garnering 61 percent. Sovereign free association, which would have allowed for more autonomy, received 33 percent, while independence got 5 percent.

President Barack Obama earlier expressed clear support for the referendum and pledged to respect the will of the Puerto Rican people in the event of a clear majority.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that he will try to push through a change to Senate rules that would limit the GOP’s ability to filibuster bills.

Speaking in the wake of Tuesday’s election, which boosted Senate Democrats’ numbers slightly, Mr. Reid said he won’t end filibusters altogether but that the rules need to change so that the minority party cannot use the legislative blocking tool as often.

“I think that the rules have been abused and that we’re going to work to change them,” he told reporters. “Were not going to do away with the filibuster but we’re going to make the Senate a more meaningful place.”

Republicans, who have 47 of the chamber’s 100 seats in this current Congress, have repeatedly used that strong minority to block parts of President Obama’s agenda on everything from added stimulus spending to his judicial picks.

A filibuster takes 60 senators to overcome it.

Leaders of both parties have been reluctant to change the rules because they value it as a tool when they are in the minority.

But Mr. Reid said things changed over the last few years when he repeatedly faced off against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, who had said his chief political goal was defeating Mr. Obama. Mr. Reid said that led the GOP to abuse the filibuster.

…At the end of the day, we’ve had a half-century of cultural decline in this country since the early 1960′s. You cannot endure a half-century of cultural decline without paying the price in leadership.

Tonight we paid that price.

And for the next four years we will pay far more dearly.

In January, America hits the fiscal cliff. The GOP still holds the House of Representatives, so it can fight a holding action against full-on socialism. And the 2014 elections offer another tantalizing opportunity for Republicans to regain the Senate.

But the damage that will be done to our economy as a result of that holding action against an economic illiterate president unencumbered by re-election is incalculable. Taxes will rise, and Obama will blame John Boehner. The economy will contract, and he’ll blame Republicans. Sequestration will gut our military, and our enemies will take advantage.

In four years we will not recognize our country. In four years we will be without any illusions about the fact that we are in an economic depression. And in four years we will have a war – because war typically follows depression.

We will hit the debt ceiling. Not the one Congress debates raising every few months – the real debt ceiling. The one which happens when you go to the bond market looking to sell Treasury debt and can’t find buyers. Either that, or we go toward a full-on monetization of our debt.

Our choice will be Greece or the Weimar Republic. Or perhaps both.

Half the country voted against this future. But the other half didn’t. And because, given that choice, they opted for decline and the loss of individual responsibility and freedom.

Mitt Romney was never more correct than when he said to that crowd – and the hidden camera he didn’t know was there – in Florida that 47 percent of the population thinks of themselves as victims, doesn’t pay taxes and refuses to take responsibility. He was castigated for saying it, but he spoke the truth.

In this country, in 2012, the truth will cost you an election. Whether that statement did the deed to Romney is hard to say. But it didn’t help him.

This country needs to take a hard look in the mirror. We’re teaching our children values our grandparents can’t even fathom, we’re abandoning what made us great and we are knowingly watching our country decline.

Fixing this will require a much better America than tonight’s election showed that we have.

We will bear a terrible, terrible cost of this sad reality over the next four years. What will be left in four years, we can only imagine.

Pray. Buy gold. Live the best life you can. But know that our country is in dire straits and bad times are coming.

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Americans for the first time approved gay marriage at the ballot box on Tuesday, pointing to changing attitudes on the divisive issue.

In Maine and Maryland, voters approved ballot initiatives to begin allowing same-sex unions. Those wins mark a first for a cause that had previously been rejected by voters in more than 30 states, including as recently as 2009 in Maine.

In Washington state, where voters also weighed an initiative to legalize gay marriage, the vote count was expected to stretch on for days. With half of the vote counted as of 1 a.m. Eastern time, nearly 52% supported the idea.

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