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An important update to this report from last week -- it appears that Harry Reid is struggling to cobble together the requisite 51 votes to nuke long-standing minority prerogatives in the Senate:   Democrats don’t have the 51 votes they need in the Senate to change filibuster rules that could make it harder for the GOP minority to wield power in the upper chamber. Lawmakers leading the charge acknowledge they remain short, but express optimism they’ll hit their goal. “I haven’t counted 51 just yet, but we’re working,” said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), a leading proponent of the so-called constitutional...

Byron Bunda, a junior at the University of Connecticut, had been looking forward to casting his first vote for president last Tuesday. But a voter registration snafu in Mansfield involving the Connecticut Public Interest Research Group denied Bunda and 92 other voters, mostly UConn students, the ability to cast their ballots. Ninety-three voter registration cards that were supposed to be submitted to the Mansfield Registrar of Voters were lost in a filing cabinet and not recovered in time for the election, according to Andrea Epling, Mansfield's Democratic Registrar of Voters. Bunda, of Larchmont, N.Y., said he filled out a registration...

At the press briefing today, White House press secretary Jay Carney was grilled about when and how the President was notified about the Gen. Petreaus scandal and the Gen. Allen scandal. Question: So is it accurate to say the president still has full faith in Gen. Allen? MR. CARNEY: He has faith in Gen. Allen, believes he’s doing and has done an excellent job at ISAF, and I would refer you to the Pentagon for the process under way with regards to Gen. Allen.

The Center for Security Policy presents a panel discussion Benghazi: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Influence of Shariah Doctrine Tuesday, November 13, 2012 Featuring nationally-recognized experts and authors: Dr. Andrew G. Bostom - author of Sharia versus Freedom (Prometheus Books, October 2012). Dr. Bostom's earlier publications include The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History and The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims . He posts regularly at http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog. Diana West - author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press, April 2013). Ms. West's earlier publications...

Computer security industry pioneer John McAfee says he has gone into hiding in Belize because he believes authorities there are trying to frame him for the murder of a neighbor, a crime he says he did not commit, according to Wired magazine. Belize police are searching for McAfee as "a person of interest" in a murder investigation. "You can say I'm paranoid about it, but they will kill me, there is no question. They've been trying to get me for months. They want to silence me," Wired quoted McAfee as saying on its website. "I am not well liked by...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: "NBCUniversal is laying off about 450 people, or roughly 1.5 percent of its workforce of about 30,000, in a round of belt-tightening that began in September," and this is Obama's network. I mean, this network has been overrun by leftists. It has. Not just MSNBC. I mean, the whole shootin' match has been taken over by the leftists. And I want to see now. You know, when John Schnatter of Papa John's says, "I gotta lay off some people or convert 'em to part time," and when the Applebee's guy does the same thing, they are hit...

State Rep. Jerry O’Neil, R-Columbia Falls, is spooked enough about the country’s fiscal picture to request that his legislative pay come in the form of gold and silver coins. In a letter sent to Montana Legislative Services this week, O’Neil cites Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which states in part that no state shall “make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” He said that in his 10 years as a legislator, he considered it a “trivial matter” and he “did not want to be branded as a fanatic over an issue...

TORONTO — Police are investigating after a war memorial was vandalized on Remembrance Day in Toronto. The Victory Peace memorial in Coronation Park was defaced with the words “Canada will burn praise Allah” written in what appeared to be black marker. City workers were called in to clean the bronze memorial, built in the 1990s. Someone walking through the park on Sunday noticed the vandalism and reported it to authorities. Police say they don’t have any suspects at the moment.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: This is out of Ohio. And, of course, there was no way this news was going to hit before the election. Ohio families receiving food stamps -- and there's a ton of them, because we learned yesterday that the food stamp rolls grew at a record pace from July to August. We've already got 47 million Americans on food stamps and growing. We have the regime advertising in Mexico on Mexican radio soap operas for food stamps in America, how to access them, how to get them. We have the Republican Party joining with the Democrats on...

In an interview with POLITICO, Paul said he’ll return to Congress this week pushing measures long avoided by his party. He wants to work with liberal Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Republicans to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for pot possession. He wants to carve a compromise immigration plan with an “eventual path” to citizenship for illegal immigrants, a proposal he believes could be palatable to conservatives. And he believes his ideas — along with pushing for less U.S. military intervention in conflicts overseas — could help the GOP broaden its tent and appeal to crucial voting blocs that handed Democrats...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: You know, folks, you have to think, you just have to think, with Bill Clinton watching all this, all these affairs going on in the military, Bill Clinton's gotta be kicking himself for dodging the draft. I mean, look at what he missed. It's all too easy, folks, to forget the human toll that this is taking on the people involved. For example, Petraeus is now gonna have to run for the presidency as a Democrat. His chances a Republican are shot, but this is a resume enhancement for a Democrat. You know what this is? This...

With the national exit poll showing Obama winning with just 39 percent of white voters, a smaller share than any Democrat since Mondale, the emerging conventional wisdom holds that a demographic tidal wave of minority turnout cost Romney the presidency. As a result, Republicans are focusing on their poor performance with the burgeoning Latino population; even Sean Hannity says he's "evolved" on immigration reform. But while the national exit poll data give the impression that Romney got the job done with white voters, Romney's stellar national performance obscures stark regional differences that suggest the GOP has its own problem...

We mighta, coulda, woulda, shoulda, still-some-day-may elect a president serious about the matter of the nation's freedoms. Or, possibly, not. The second possibility -- so an ancient mariner reflects -- arises from a sea change in our culture. It could be that more than half of us - a fast-rising proportion -- don't understand "serious" the way it was understood until half a century ago. The loose, lax, louche United States of 2012 seems dissimilar in important respects to the country that chose Dwight D. Eisenhower for president. A week after the Nov. 6 debacle, the post-mortems go on: the...

What can we learn from Election 2012? Some reflections: GERARD ALEXANDERSome are feeling despair: If Republicans gave it their all, and couldn’t beat a polarizing president in a terrible economy, maybe they can never win again.This is bad political analysis, for four reasons. First, many perceive the economy as no worse than when Obama took office, and so they don’t see him as incompetent. Months ago, several political-science models that emphasize economic factors predicted a slender incumbent victory. Second, Obama won with 51 percent, which even the New York Times headlines acknowledged was a slim win. Third, Romney mobilized fewer...

RUSH: A bunch of CEOs are in Washington. These people are beside themselves. They're having to hire outside consultants to pore through the Obamacare legislation and advise them, tell them what they have to do to comply. And they are asking for some kind of relief. You've got John Schnatter at Papa John's pizza, the Applebee's people and a number of other restaurant chains are saying, "We have no choice." If they're gonna keep our products priced where they are, which is the price they've all determined is the most sensible for profit stability and affordability for customers, they're gonna...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: A bunch of CEOs are in Washington. These people are beside themselves. They're having to hire outside consultants to pore through the Obamacare legislation and advise them, tell them what they have to do to comply. And they are asking for some kind of relief. You've got John Schnatter at Papa John's pizza, the Applebee's people and a number of other restaurant chains are saying, "We have no choice." If they're gonna keep our products priced where they are, which is the price they've all determined is the most sensible for profit stability and affordability for customers,...

Drillers in Utah and Colorado are poking into a massive shale deposit trying to find a way to unlock oil reserves that are so vast they would swamp OPEC. A recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated that if half of the oil bound up in the rock of the Green River Formation could be recovered it would be "equal to the entire world's proven oil reserves." Both the GAO and private industry estimate the amount of oil recoverable to be 3 trillion barrels. "In the past 100 years — in all of human history -- we have...

Could Paris teach Washington a thing or two about protecting civil liberties while tracking down terrorists at home? In the United States, revelations that the Bush administration mandated domestic spying have caused a political uproar. France, however, has been spying on its citizens for years, as part of its effective, albeit controversial, counterterrorist system.In 1988, the FBI invited Alain Marsaud, then Frances top antiterrorist magistrate, to speak about terrorism to the bureaus new recruits at its academy in Quantico, Virginia. Marsaud, now a conservative lawmaker, told the audience of would-be feds of the deadly threat that radical Islamist terrorist networks...

This month yielded yet another published study — which received positive media attention — based on the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study. The NLLFS is about to enter its third decade of following the same 78 respondents, who were “planned” and born to lesbian mothers employing artificial reproductive technology; in nearly all the families studied, the children were being raised by their biological mother and her partner. While any sociologist worth his or her degree can appreciate the laborious task of keeping track of and reinterviewing the same group of people over many years, this particular data-collection effort probably...