The parties are dominated by radicals. Radicals care enough to get involved. But radicalism doesn't win you the Presidency. In a Presidential race, the radicals are a liability.

Although there are more conservatives than liberals in America, the Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis either - the American people are open to Presidents from either party. They do not share the closed mindedness that partisans have.

The American people want a vision for running the country that has a chance of actually working.

Kerry never asserted such a vision - a vote for him was really a vote against George Bush, for a variety of reasons. Obama, on the other hand, inspired a lot of people in his first campaign that he had a different way forward.

The reason Republicans couldn't sell it this time around was that the story was deregulation and low taxes. Its the same story that we'd gotten from the Bush administration, and people know that those policies created the economic mess that we've just lived through. Only partisans are unable to see that.

Romney played up the idea that these four years haven't been that great, so why not try something different, but people weren't buying it. They associate the pain they are currently feeling with the policies Romney is offering to switch to.

I'm not happy about all the talk about demographics that is factoring into the aftermath. Its overtly racist - its the view that America is a country of people of particular colors and sexes and your political views more or less boil down to what color your skin is and what kind of sex organs you have, so if a particular party can just appeal to certain colors and certain organs they can build a coalition that will put them into office.

The Presidency is not won on an idealogical basis, so building coalitions of identity groups is not sufficient. Furthermore, I want a candidate that appeals to what I think rather than who I am.

If Republicans want to be relevant again they either have to come up with a plan that actually makes sense right now, or they have to wait until the plan they have makes sense again.

A stuck clock, is, in fact, right twice a day.

There are times when lower taxes and deregulation are the things that you want. The 1980's were such a time. Every situation is not just like the 1980's. This situation is not anything like the 1980's. The solution that worked in the 1980's will not work now. The solutions that will work now would not have worked then.

If the Republicans could come to the table with a proposal that might actually work now, they would be more relevant, but they can't. They are signed up to rigid agreements not to raise taxes and they are prepared to drive the country off the cliff rather than raise the debt ceiling.

They are too beholden to their solutions to actually think about the problem, and they think the reason Romney lost was because he was too moderate, rather than because he wasn't proposing something that made sense, so they aren't going to start putting the problem before their ideology any time soon.

So the Republican party is our stuck clock, which we are going to put away for now because it isn't telling us the right time. I think it is going to be about another decade before we really need to get that clock out of the closet again. By then it is going to be covered by a lot of dust and it might be hard to get it running. That means the pendulum is probably going to swing too far to the left, because once it gets going in that direction it might be hard to slow it down.

There is a wildcard though. If the Dems make a major national security mistake, the Republicans will be back in again in a heartbeat.

I think this is a pretty accurate summation:

Heather Higgins, of Independent Women's Voice: "A majority of the American people believe that the one good point about Republicans is they won't raise taxes. However they also believe Republicans caused the economic mess in the first place and might do it again, cannot be trusted to care about cutting spending in a way that is remotely concerned about who it hurts, and are retrograde to the point of caricature on everything else."

Noonan: 'People Are Afraid of Change' - WSJ.com

Now Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, the co-CEOs at the $2 trillion Pimco money managers, are citing the same biblical warning to jar investors awake and prepare for the coming lean years of slow, low growth and austerity. Except in Pimco’s new warning, the future just got much, much darker for investors — no recovery until 2022.

The long blah.

Stocks dead, bonds deader till 2022: Pimco - Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch

And what really takes place in the United States is that there's an almost unspoken assumption that this is the war that the United States can win on its own. And I just don't think that's true. So, what we see is the U.S. trying to do more, the U.S. trying to do more. The only people that can really decisively defeat al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula are Yemenis themselves. I think what's taking place right now is that by the U.S. acting so heavy-handedly that the U.S. is actually closing down the amount of space that local clerics, that tribesmen in Yemen have, to stand up and confront al-Qaida and say, look, what it is that you're doing, what it is that you're arguing has no place within Islam. And in fact, we have seen some clerics do this in Yemen. There was a case just a few months ago where an anti-al-Qaida cleric was standing up, was lecturing in the mosque that these suicide bombings were a travesty, that they were crimes. And this cleric, unfortunately, was an individual who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.

'The Last Refuge': Fighting Al-Qaida In Yemen | WBUR & NPR

Former Republican Florida Governor Charlie

Crist, who extended early voting hours in 2008 by executive order to address long lines during that presidential election, said he was approached about early voting but told the GOP consultants and staffers that he would veto any proposed legislative changes that would reduce early voting.

“The people that worked in Tallahassee felt that early voting was bad, ” Crist said. “And I heard about it after I signed the executive order expanding it. I heard from Republicans around the state who were bold enough to share it with me that, ‘You just gave the election to Barack Obama.’”

It wasn’t until Gov. Rick Scott took office in January 2011 that the idea went anywhere. It passed the legislature that session and Scott signed it into law.

“I assume they decided, ‘It’s 2011, Crist is gone, let’s give it a shot,’” Crist said. “And that’s exactly what they did. And it is exactly what it turned out to be.”

Former Florida GOP leaders say voter suppression was reason... | www.palmbeachpost.com

The premise of the study is this: take the 210 television media markets in the United States, figure out how many college football fans they have, and then allocate them between the 120 current Football Bowl Subdivision programs.

A very interesting set of charts and data about college football.

The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos) - NYTimes.com

Right after the Presidential election last week, Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala penned an opinion piece suggesting that one way the Republicans could "reset", and actually attract the youth vote, would be to become the party of copyright reform. We had actually wondered if that was going to happen back during the SOPA fight, when it was the Republicans who bailed on the bill, while most of those who kept supporting it were Democrats. Since then, however, there hadn't been much movement. Until now. Late on Friday, the Republican Study Committee, which is the caucus for the House Republicans, released an amazing document debunking various myths about copyright law and suggesting key reforms.

Of course, this lasted all of about 24 hours...

Update: Wow. It took less than 24 hours for the RSC to fold to Hollywood pressure. They have now retracted the report and attempted to claim that it was not properly vetted.

So here is the big question - what do Republicans really want?

1. Free markets
2. A way to appeal to younger voters
3. A way to siphon off some of the money Hollywood donates to Democrats

(Tonight I'm probably going to have a nightmare in which I'm asked to make a political choice between 4th amendment protections and limited copyrights.)

House Republicans come out, briefly, as the Internet Party

Rep Lofgren - Thank you for coming to this forum and asking for comments on this important issue.

A website is a forum for expression, both by the operator and potentially the users as well, so any takedown has first amendment implications. It is important to consider the first amendment rights of the website users as well as the website operators. In general, websites should not be taken down unless the operators (and not just a user) of the website are likely guilty of violating the law. In cases where websites have both legitimate and illegitimate uses and users, efforts should be taken to minimize the impact of seizures to users who are actually violating the law. It may not make sense to take the entire site down in such a case - in fact I think that sort of action should be an absolute last resort.

Approval from a court should be required before any site is taken down. (Earlier this year a startup called JotForm had its domain pulled by the United States Secret Service for no apparent reason and AFAIK with no judicial process whatsoever - this shouldn't be happening.)

Takedowns should only take place if there is no other way to stop the criminal activity on the site. A standard similar to that for a preliminary injunction might be appropriate in the case that a website needs to be taken down - law enforcement should demonstrate that a criminal claim against the website operators is likely to succeed on the merits based on evidence already assembled, the harm associated with keeping the website up is greater than that associated with taking it down, and there is no reasonable alternative that would have a more minimal impact. Website operators should have speedy access to a forum in which to contest any of the facts that led to the approval for seizure (including the assertion that there is no alternative to total seizure of the site). Reportedly Dajaz1 spent a year trying to contest the facts of their seizure - that sort of delay is far too long.

As you can see from the comments on this forum, there are a variety of related intellectual property issues that Reddit users are concerned about. A theme that appears in many of these posts is a concern about the lack of effective deterrents for fraudulent or inappropriate DMCA takedown notifications. Although the DMCA allows for misrepresentation claims, AFAIK only 3 have been made during the existence of the statue. Certainly, the number of inappropriate DMCA takedowns is vastly larger, leading to the perception that this deterrence tool is not working.

I think this community is broadly concerned about the use of inappropriate copyright claims as a censorship mechanism, regardless of whether or not they involve the DMCA's takedown provisions. Many of the concerns about the DMCA relate to the way that the anti-circumvention provisions threaten computer security researchers, reverse engineers, and other technical professionals whenever they do something that large tech companies dislike - regardless of whether they've done something results in actual copyright infringement. The EFF published a paper titled Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years Under the DMCA which documents many examples. Some of those examples involve activities that are prohibited by the law. Others involve misrepresentations. It is difficult in our legal system for an individual citizen to contest a legal misrepresentation being made by a large organization due to the expense associated with defending one's self in court.

Thank you for your time.

_decius_ comments on Rep Zoe Lofgren Asks Reddit Users to Crowdsource Domain Name Seizure Legislative Proposal

MakerBot has just opened its first retail store on Mulberry Street in lower Manhattan -- a great neighborhood, by the way, and a perfect place for a 3D printing store. The store includes many wonderments, including a 3D photo booth, where you get your head scanned and then printed out.

I honestly think there is a fair amount of money to be made putting franchises of this in malls.

MakerBot opens a NYC store with a 3D photo booth - Boing Boing

People believe that memory is like a video or files stored in some sort of computer. But it's not like that at all. Memories are actually constructed anew each time that you remember something.

Each time you take an old activation sequence in your brain and re-construct it; like building a toy airplane out of Lego and then smashing the Lego, putting it back into the box, and building it again. Each time you build it it's going to be a little bit different based on the context and experience you have had since the last time you created it.

Mind games: Why everything you thought you knew about yourself is wrong - Features - Books - The Independent