Something just struck me. I haven't heard a single word about anyone anywhere refusing to issue marriage licenses other than Kim Davis.

Has the media simply latched onto her for some reason and ignored others, or are there no others?

The fact that there don't appear to be others being reported would seem to indicate that there are few, if any. If so, that says something very positive about this country.

Kim Davis may be an extreme exception, and not an indication of overall backwardness in this country.

I just saw this ad on MSNBC:

It definitely has a bad smell to it:

"Family"
"Security"
The evil government making life more difficult.

All hallmarks of some kind of corporate disinformation.

So I decided to research a little further. I checked ownership of the domain securefamily.org.

https://who.godaddy.com/whoisstd.aspx?domain=securefamily.org&prog_id=GoDaddy&k=yxtt0Qkxct78vOj3WtCRioxThOC5HoztvKV32SJnbrZqV%2fPh0EpX97XWojkEJGZu

It shows that the registrant name is AALU and the contact email uses the domain aalu.org.

If you go to http://aalu.org/ you'll see that it's an organization of life insurance professionals. Interesting. Why is the insurance industry oh so concerned about your financial plans?

On securefamily.org, they ask you to "TELL CONGRESS TO FIX THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR FIDUCIARY REGULATIONS" and they make it easy for you to send a form letter to Congress asking them to do so.

They don't explain what exactly these regulations are except to say that it will limit your access to certain types of investments and information about investments. I'm pretty sure that what's really happening is that the regulations will stop them from selling you bad investments and giving you misleading information.

Anyone know what this is about? What are these new regulations and why is the insurance industry trying to mislead us into opposing them? Considering how desperate the insurance industry appears to be to stop them, they're probably something that we want. If we can determine that these regulations are actually a good thing then we should support them.

The form at http://securefamily.org is prefilled with the message they want you to send to Congress, but it is possible to customize your message before sending it. You can entirely replace the message with your own. If these regulations are in reality a good thing for the average person, then we should all use the form to send a message supporting the regulations instead of the message they want us to send.

Anyone know anything about these regulations?

This was announced at Wednesday's event.

I'm the organizer for the Central Montgomery County (PA) Democratic Party meetup. I'd like to start having monthly meetups again and I'm trying to increase interest. If you're in the area and are interested in attending you can signup at http://www.meetup.com/democrat-463/. I'd appreciate it if you'd also PM me so that I know how many are signing up. You can also PM me if you have any questions.

I'm open to any suggestions about when and where we should meet and what we should discuss.

Voting needs to be more family friendly. Families have responsibilities and obligations. They sometimes work multiple shifts and have to worry about watching young children.

In particular, single parents (often widows and widowers) are sometimes solely responsible for watching young children and can have difficulty finding the time between working and caring for their children to get to the polls while they're open.

Early voting or mail in balloting are family friendly ways of voting. Who could be against that? Surely we want families to vote!

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

By Paula Reed Ward / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A jury found suspended Supreme Court Justice Joan Orie Melvin guilty on all but one count today. Her sister, Janine Orie, was found guilty on all but one count.

The sisters were charged with misapplication of government funds, theft of services and conspiracy for using the justice's former Superior Court staff and the legislative staff of a third sister, former state Sen. Jane Orie, to run campaigns for the Supreme Court in 2003 and 2009.

Among the allegations are that staffers wrote speeches, drove her to campaign events and worked the polls.

The jury was hung on one count of official oppression against Justice Orie Melvin.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/politics-state/jury-deliberating-orie-melvin-public-corruption-case-close-to-verdict-676334/

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The PA Supreme Court is currently short one (Republican) judge. As I understand it, now that she's been convicted, Governor Corbett will be able to appoint a new justice.

Until now, she couldn't serve on the court, but couldn't be replaced, so the court was balanced with 3 Republicans and 3 Democrats. Assuming Corbett appoints a Republican and the legislature approves (a likely assumption) it will go back to 4 Repubs and 3 Dems.

Source: NBC News

New Jersey's emergency experiment with email voting hasn't fared well. One election official described it as a "catastrophe" and voters are complaining that computer glitches are blocking their last-minute efforts to obtain electronic ballots. An avalanche of requests for e-mail ballots that overwhelmed county clerks' offices forced the state to extend its e-mail voting deadline to Friday afternoon at 8 p.m., though e-mail ballot requests must still be filed by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

"It has become apparent that County Clerks are receiving applications at a rate that outpages their capacity to process them without an extension," said Lt. Gov. Kim Guadango in her order extending the deadline.

Several election officials say misunderstanding is at the root of the problem: Email ballots are only permitted for residents displaced by Hurricane Sandy, but many who are not displaced are nevertheless deluging the system.

"The numbers are overwhelming. The county clerks are inundated with requests," said Michael Harper, clerk of the Board of Elections for Hudson County, N.J. which includes Hoboken, one of the hardest-hit regions recovering from Sandy. Asked to describe the situation, he said, "I would lean more towards catastrophe."

Read more: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/06/14974588-new-jerseys-email-voting-suffers-major-glitches-deadline-extended-to-friday?lite

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This could be very bad. If there are a lot of ineligible people trying to vote this way, those people may miss the chance to vote altogether.

I could have predicted that this would run into problems. Who thought that they could possibly throw something like this together so quickly?