Rage boils over on the South Shore, where recovery isn't moving fast enough. “Where are you gonna go? Next door?”

Kathy Trifeletti and Alicia Martinez sit outside of Kay Colt's (standing) house. (All photos by Andrew Gauthier)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Kathy Trifeletti and Alicia Martinez sat in the back of a car outside their neighbor Kay Colt's house on Friday, since they couldn't sit inside. The house, like many others in this neighborhood in Staten Island's Midland Beach, is a small bungalow, and it was ravaged by the storm, which flooded the whole first floor up to the ceiling and destroyed most of their belongings.

"It was like a tidal wave," said Trifeletti. She said her brother, who also lives in the neighborhood, had spent ten hours clinging to wooden boards in his attic, waiting for the floodwaters to subside in his house.

Hardly anyone had evacuated. "A lot of the families live close together, so where are you gonna go? Next door?" said Martinez. "We're all in the same boat anyway." Plus, "People who live here they live paycheck to paycheck," said Trifeletti, "and they didn’t want anybody stealing their stuff."

"There's a lot of tragedy around here," Colt said, her clothes covered in the mud that now coats every inch of her house.

Donnie and Kay Colt, outside of their home. Inside, a heart hangs on the wall that reads "Never go to bed mad, stay up and fight!"

Donnie Colt surveys his home. The floors and countertops are covered in mud.

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“Please send me evidence that supports your knowledge that women who are raped will naturally not get pregnant,” the Hustler publisher writes.

Image by Jeff Roberson / AP

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Larry Flynt wants to give Rep. Todd Akin $1 million.

But there's a catch.

"Please send me evidence that supports your knowledge that women who are raped will naturally not get pregnant," Flynt, the publisher of Hustler Magazine wrote in an open letter to Akin.

Flynt added, "I assume that you would never have ventured such an original statement about women’s reproductive biology, and suggested that women should have no fear of unwanted pregnancy from rapists, unless you have in your possession completely conclusive scientific evidence."

In August, Akin said that women's bodies have a mechanism to prevent pregnancies in the case of "legitimate rape." Later, Akin apologized for using the latter phrase, but did not walk back the underlying claim.

Flynt's full letter:

As reported extensively by Bloomberg News , a charitable remainder trust may be providing Romney with a tax break, leaving little for the Mormon Church. Here are the returns.

Via: scribd.com

Bloomberg News reported last week that Mitt Romney established a charitable remainder unitrust in 1996, calling it "one of several strategies Romney has adopted over his career to reduce his tax bill."

BuzzFeed has obtained a copy of the trust's return, posted below, through a Democratic source who filed a written request to the International Revenue Service in September.

A charitable remainder unitrust — or "CRUT" — reduces taxable income by transferring cash, security, or property to a trust, which disperses yearly payments to the trust's settlor. After the beneficiary's death, a charity of his or her choice receives the remainder of the trust's assets.

Romney's CRUT, managed by the Boston firm Ropes & Gray, designates the Mormon Church as the recipient of the fund's remaining assets, according to a listing on Romney's 2007 financial disclosure file. But while CRUTs are formally tied to charities, they are in fact often used to reduce the donor's tax burden, and to leave little for the nominal recipient.

In their lengthy piece on Romney's CRUT, Bloomberg writes that "at the same time [Romney] is benefiting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires." The money left for the church, Bloomberg writes, "has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011."

As noted on Ropes & Gray's own website, the IRS made CRUT filings — Form 5227 — open to public inspection in 2007. But in order to inspect a return, you must submit a formal request to the IRS which includes specific information about the trust — the name, trustee's address, and type of return.

Although Romney released a slew of financial disclosure forms and returns in advance of his bid for the presidency — 19 forms and filings, spanning a total of 10 years — his campaign elected not to release the CRUT filing, despite it existing in the public domain.

To keep the charitable remainder unitrust from becoming a tax shelter, Congress passed a change to the law in 1997 requiring that the value of the trust eventually left for the charity must equal at least 10 percent of the initial contribution.

But there is no suggestion that Romney is violating the law. Romney's CRUT — established in 1996, before the new regulation was enacted — is not obligated to meet that requirement.

“The trust has operated in accordance with the law,” Michele Davis, a campaign spokeswoman, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

See the CRUT returns below.

W Mitt Romney 1996 Charitable Remainder Unitrust

Via: scribd.com

Spam king, or pen pal? A lot of people were kind of sad to see him go.

This Is Rufus Gifford, President Obama's Top Fundraiser

He sends a lot of email to the 10-million-plus people on Obama's email list, asking for money.

Source: si0.twimg.com

Here's The One He Sent Tonight

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First nominee since 1996 to bag the forum.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his wife Ann take the stage at a campaign rally in West Chester, Ohio November 2, 2012.

Image by Brian Snyder / Reuters

The presidential debates may have propelled Republican nominee Mitt Romney to within striking distance of the White House, but the candidate is not fond of all debates, becoming the first major party nominee since 1996 to blow off the Presidential Youth Debate.

The non-partisan civic- and youth-engagement organization has allowed younger Americans across the country to ask the questions that matter to them to the presidential candidates. Indeed some of the questions — including one on youth unemployment — appear to be teed up for Romney to answer, but he declined to participate according to the group.

Instead, President Barack Obama's video responses have been posted to the website unanswered by the Republican side.

A Romney campaign spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The organization's statement is below:

In June both President Obama and Gov. Romney were invited in the hope they would both take this opportunity to address millions of young people about the issues that are most important to them. Unfortunately, despite our efforts over a four-month period, Gov. Romney declined participation. He is the first and only candidate in our 16-year history to decide not to answer the questions young Americans chose as most important through the Presidential Youth Debate. With Millennials being the nation’s largest potential voting bloc, we’re still very much hoping Gov. Romney might change his mind and provide his responses via video or even as text anytime before Nov. 6th, so young Americans can cast an even more informed ballot in the Election.

Pessimism from a top Republican figure.

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A theme that will be sure to play out if Obama loses on Tuesday.

Source: youtube.com

The President's aides won't discuss the politics of the storm, but the president begins his speech with talk of recovery. “The president's going to win thanks to a woman named Sandy,” says one supporter in Iowa.

Clinton introduces Obama in Concord, New Hampshire Sunday morning.

Image by Jason Reed / Reuters

CONCORD, NH — Bill Clinton took the stage at the corner of North State and Main to deliver a message about Hurricane Sandy: That it made President Barack Obama look very, very good.

“You know [Obama] proved [it in] the way he handled this terrible storm Sandy in the Northeast: getting off the campaign trail, putting aside politics, working with the Republican governor of New Jersey, the independent mayor of New York City, and the Democratic governors of New York and Connecticut,” Clinton told the crowd on a chilly fall morning in Concord, NH. “It was a stunning example of how ‘we’re all in this together’ is a way better philosophy than you’re on your own.”

Since returning to the campaign trail on Thursday, the opening part of Obama’s stump speech has been dedicated to discussing the response and aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

In New Hampshire today, following Bill Clinton, the president continued to weave the drama and tragedy of the hurricane into the larger narrative of American resilence, connecting it with the kind of hope-oriented themes he’s deployed in his stump speech all year.

“For the past several days obviously all of us have been focused on one of the worst storms of our lifetimes, and New Hampshire knows about storms, [and] obviously, what we’ve seen happen in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut just breaks our heart,” the president said, noting he’d visited New Jersey, and was on phone with the FEMA director, governors and mayors regularly.

”We’re going to help them rebuild," Obama said "That’s what we do as Americans….[We see] leaders of different parties working to fix what’s broken, a spirit that says no matter how bad a storm is, no matter how tough the times are, we’re all in this together. We rise and fall as one nation and as one people. That spirit, New Hampshire, has guided this country along its improbable journey for more than two centuries. That spirit that carried us through the trial and tribulations of the last four years."

He then launched into his more familiar critique of how the current economic and geopolitical situation was largely the fault of the Bush administration, and how he’s been trying his best to get out the hole he claims to have found the country in.

Neither White House officials nor campaign officials will publiclly discuss the political impact of the hurricane, and attempts by reporters to ask about how voters perceived the president's behavior and the consquences on the presidential elaction have thus far been soundly rebuffed.

“We’re not concerned with that,” Obama senior advisor David Plouffe told reporters at the gaggle on Friday after being asked by BuzzFeed about how voters viewed the president’s response.

On the record, too, they’ve continued to say that they always had confidence that they would win due to what David Axelrod describes as “cold hard data,” and note that the early voting operation that they see as a key to victory was in place well before the storm hit.

But privately, campaign officials will acknowledge what they view as the president’s superb handling of the disaster, and say that the support of Governor Chris Christie and Michael Bloomberg has helped the president politically — and insulated him from potential criticism during what is likely to be a long and messy clean-up.

The storm appears to have put a dead stop to the post-Denver Romney surge, paralyzing the race for days of wall-to-wall coverage of the president acting, yes, presidential.

But if Obama's staff insists that it's politically incorrect to discuss the politics of the storm, its place in his and Clintons' stump speeches tell that story clearly.

And Obama's rank and file supporters say they see clearly that the storm helped the president.

“The president’s going to win thanks to a woman named Sandy,” an Obama volunteer, Tom Hammon, told BuzzFeed at a rally on Saturday in Dubuque, Iowa, where the president had five point lead in the most recent public poll. Hammon says he’s volunteered on every Democratic campaign since 1968 — and even mowed George McGovern’s name into a wheat field during the '72 campaign.

Obama's going to win, Hammon continued, because of a woman named Sandy and "a governor named Chris Christie.”

The vice president pleads with supporters in the crucial battleground state. “We need you, Ohio. We need you!”

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The really literal version of Obama's campaign strategy to appeal to female voters. “The whole universe revolves around me in some way.”

Source: youtube.com

And a farewell to Iowa.

DES MOINES, Iowa — In his last Iowa stop of the campaign, Mitt Romney had some thanks to give: to the 4,000 supporters who packed an airport hangar on Sunday morning, to the Republicans who introduced him — and to the state's largest newspaper.

"A special shout-out to the Des Moines Register," Romney exclaimed from the podium. "Thank you for your endorsement!"

The crowd went wild.

At a time when then the relevance of newspaper endorsements has dwindled to near obscurity, the Des Moines Register's decision to back Romney has stood out for its symbolic value — and its ability to give hope to local Republicans.

Not only did the paper endorse Barack Obama in 2008, a year after his political career was launched with a surprise Iowa caucus victory; it has endorsed a Democrat in every presidential election since 1972.

These are facts not lost on Romney supporters across the state, many of whom have long viewed the Register as a left-leaning paper that has a made a quadrennial ritual of endorsing the candidate they oppose. Now, the sudden shift in the paper's partisan loyalty has become the talk of the Romney rallies.

At a campaign event last week near Davenport, Romney supporters' eyes lit up when they were asked about the paper backing their candidate.

"That's huge! Huge! Huge!" exclaimed Lori Kieffer-Garrison, a public defender who splits her time between Iowa and Illinois. "For the Register to come out and say that, and for 40 years they've only endorsed a Democrat, that says a lot. They're willing to say we need a change. Enough is enough."

"That is amazing!" said Grover Hartsuch, a retiree. "[Romney's] party hasn't been endorsed for years by the Register. I heard it just like everybody else... they're all talking about it."

Another supporer, Tim Anderson, said he could feel momentum in the state shifting toward Romney, and he cited the Register's endorsement as his best evidence.

"The last Republican they endorsed was, what, Richard Nixon? That means something here," Anderson said. "And I believe a lot of their readers will understand that's what they need to do, vote for Romney."

It's unclear whether the endorsement has actually moved the polls in the state, where Obama clings to a slim lead. But in a race where election-day turnout could make the difference, giving the Republican base a moral victory is no small thing. The Romney campaign has appeared to recognize this, featuring the endorsement in an ad airing in the state.

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, appeared rattled by the paper's endorsement, with Stephanie Cutter asserting that the editorial wasn't "based at all in reality."

But if Obama wins the state — and especially if he wins comfortably — it could represent the last, dying breath of relevance for newspaper endorsements. It's something that even the most ink-stained, old-guard pundits are beginning to realize.

When news of the endorsement first broke, Huffington Post editorial director Howard Fineman tweeted that it was the first convincing sign that Romney could win the election. A week later, he took it back.

"I thought that the Register, one of the few truly statewide newspapers left in the business in one of the nation's most well-read states, was still an exception," Fineman wrote in a HuffPo column about newspapers' declining relevance. "That was romanticism on my part."

It's science.

Image by Patrick McDermott / Getty Images

Don't worry about the polls; don't worry about Nate Silver's predictions; don't worry about the candidates themselves. To know who's going to win Tuesday's presidential election, all you need to do is keep an eye on today's Redskins-Panthers game.

In every one of the last 18 elections, the winner of the presidency has corresponded with the outcome of the most recent Redskins home game in this way: if the Redskins win, then the party that won the previous election's popular vote — in this case, the Democrats and President Obama — wins; if the Redskins lose, then the party that lost the previous election's popular vote — the Republicans and Mitt Romney — wins. For example, in 2008, the Redskins lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers 23-6, predicting an Obama win over Senator John McCain, since the Republican party won the popular vote in 2004.

The Redskins are a three-point favorite against the struggling Carolina Panthers today, meaning that President Obama should feel pretty comfortable; however, at the end of the first quarter, the Panthers lead 7-3. I'll update once we have a result in that game so you can begin preparing for the next four years as soon as possible.

UPDATE: The Panthers won 21-13, but the game wasn't even that close — Carolina controlled for most of the contest. Everyone should probably get used to the phrase "President Mitt Romney."

Seriously, though: if Obama wins, it'll be the first time the rule was wrong in SEVENTY-TWO YEARS. Which is interesting, if nothing else.

Cookies, free booze and Biz Markie. Of course.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — It’s fitting that after an election that has featured an empty chair, a Lindsey Lohan endorsement and the return of Rosanne Barr, that the last great party of election 2012 would held in DC, hosted by an adorable Japanese cat and featured a DJ set by the legendary Biz Markie.

For a city that is often divided along stark economic and race lines — as well as transplant versus natives — Saturday night’s Hello Kitty for President party was the perfect, random antidote for one of the most bitter campaigns in modern history.

They had a Hello Kitty for President-themed Claw game.

Like any good election party, there was tons of propaganda.

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A new Republican consensus: The candidate, and the party, have done a pretty good job. “You just keep throwing money at the problem and it doesn't resolve,” mourns a Republican operative.

Romney in Cleveland Sunday.

Image by Brian Snyder / Reuters

MANSFIELD, Ohio — With just over 48 hours until polls close, many Republicans are concluding that they have done the best they could have done to win the 2012 presidential election

Mitt Romney has been, in the home stretch, the best Mitt Romney he could be, and as good a general election candidate as the party has fielded at least since George W. Bush’s first campaign. He has flip-flopped, yes, but his flips have taken him toward palatable general election positions. The Republican Party infrastructure has recovered from its years in the wilderness under Michael Steel, and put together a passable field operation and a gangbusters fundraising one. And a constellation of Republican outside groups have raised and spent more money than anyone imagined they could.

Now, while there are no shortage of criticisms of the campaign — Romney’s bad summer, the inefficiencies of SuperPAC spending — there is a sense on the right that Mitt Romney has a decent shot at victory — something unimaginable six months ago when he was down in the polls and struggling with the aftermath of a bitter GOP primary.

“I think in the end he did very well and that Obama had inherent characteristic and demographic advantages,” said one Republican operative close to the Romney campaign. “Overall he ran a good race.”

“If you remember Mitt from 2007 he was terrible,” the Republican said.

Others are blunter. A conservative operative deeply involved with the web of outside groups spending heavily on Romney’s behalf expressed frustration recently at the failure of the flood of money being spent to move the dial.

“You keep throwing money at the problem and it just doesn't resolve,” he said a few weeks ago of the ongoing efforts to damage the president of the United States with expensive ad campaigns.

After the storm, the same operative remarked, “Obama is just the luckiest man that ever lived.”

The consensus in the Republican political class that the party has done its best has specific consequences. The scorched-earth attacks on President Obama that began in the summer of 2009, and the move of the “Birther” movement from the fringe to the center of Republican politics soon after the 2008 election, reflected the deep disappointment with John McCain’s failure to launch searing attacks on the Democrat. Romney’s strong finish will help unite the party behind him in victory — but it may also mean that, in defeat, the party will need to look for a new kind of answer.

There is little doubt that the conservative movement has the GOP firmly in its hands. After a Romney defeat, movement favorites like Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio will be the party’s leaders, and the occasional speculation that Republican “soul-searching” could take the party back leftward seems pure fantasy. But the failure to defeat a weakened incumbent would also suggest that the current Republican coalition, and its dependence on ever-higher margins in the shrinking constituency of white men, cannot hold. (Others may write the loss off to a freak hurricane, and move on.)

In the shorter term, however, the consensus that Romney has run a decent campaign may at least shield the candidate and his aides from the wrath of their fellow Republicans, and it is not without self-interest that they are making that case emphatically in these final days.

“We’re running the best field program we’ve ever run in Ohio,” maintained one Ohio Romney campaign worker. “And we’re doing better than we thought we’d be doing here a few months ago.”

Indeed, across swing states, aides and party operatives say they believe Romney is doing the best he could under the circumstances — being a rich, former private equity executive, with a penchant for massaging his positions on issues to win an election.

“We were never going to have the Obama groundswell of support,” said a Boston-based aide, “this is how we were always going to win, if we are going to win, and I believe we will win — close.”

That’s not to say there haven’t been missteps — there’ve been many. Romney’s surreptitiously taped dismissal of 47% of Americans and his harsh rhetoric on immigration — his support for “self-deportation” are among them. But they’ve been made by a candidate who Republicans knew was far from perfect, and only one really sticks in party workers’ craws.

“With hindsight being 20/20, the auto bailout seems to be the most preventable thing,” said the operative. “They could've dealt with it months ago, but still hard to imagine him even being FOR the bailout given the political environment. So in that sense it was going to be a problem regardless.”

And while there’s little doubt that many Republican insiders, looking at public polling are bracing for a narrow defeat, many can also see the chance of that pleasantest of surprises, a Romney victory.

“I want Romney to get the credit he deserves if he wins this thing,” tweeted conservative blogger Dan Riehl. “Fair to say, he's performed better than many expected.”

The MSNBC host sees Romney's revenge soundbite as more “ethnic talk” from the “bad side” of the campaign.

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This (probably)* doesn't have to be all that complicated. Obama has several paths to victory. Romney has fewer. And these are the main ones, organized by the time (EST) that polls close.

Image by Chris Ritter/Buzzfeed

*The New York Times counts 512 possible outcomes — but the paths above are the likely ones.

The man who was sent to the frozen tundra by the Internet threw his weight behind the president with a spirited pep talk during a campaign stop in Hollywood, Florida.

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“I don't think it is going to be close in the Electoral College,” the Vice President said in an interview with Hardball tonight. But downplayed chances in Virginia and Florida.

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Image by

It's missing North Carolina and Colorado. Paging the Obama campaign.

Vice President Joe Biden predicted a big electoral win for the Democratic ticket on Tuesday night, but left off two swing states from his map.

In an interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Biden said he and President Barack Obama will win Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Hampshire, adding that they have an "even chance" of winning Virginia and Florida.

But Biden skipped two swing states — North Carolina, which is leaning toward Republicans, and Colorado, which has been thought to be somewhat of a toss-up. The Obama campaign has proclaimed an early vote lead in North Carolina, arguing Republicans need to win 65 percent of the Election Day vote, and Colorado has long been a battleground, but one that Democrats believe they can carry.

BIDEN: I think that we're going to win. I don't think it's going to be close in the Electoral College. I think we're going to win clearly and I think you're going to see -- I think we're going to win this state, Ohio.

I've been in here 23, 24 days, something like that. I think we're going to win Iowa, we're going to win Wisconsin, we're going to win Nevada, we're going to win New Hampshire. I think we've got an even chance of winning Virginia and Florida.

So it could be a big win. And it also could be close. But I think the firewall here of Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa -- I think it's going to hold firm.

For recount-ready legal teams, every vote could be The Deciding Factor. A weekend squabble in Ohio shows just how seriously and closely every decision is being watched.

The provisional ballot affirmation form at the center of the latest Ohio voting dispute.

A last-minute order by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted that includes a disputed form to be filled out by provisional voters in the state led to a court filing within hours and commentary that the move was "The Biggest Legal Story of the Weekend."

The portion of the form in question was not new on Friday. It was designed by Husted's office earlier, and states that a voter is to check a box noting which type of identification he or she used in casting a provisional ballot — despite state law directing poll workers to make such notations. Husted's use of the form again on Friday led Ari Berman at The Nation to write that "Eleventh-Hour GOP Voter Suppression Could Swing Ohio."

Although there are conflicting signals from the secretary of state's office, the directive appears to have told county boards to toss out the ballots in question if the voter did not check off the box on the form. This was enough to raise red flags from Democrats who are watching Husted, a Republican, closely after having faced off in court with him already several times this year.

More than anything else, the quick back-and-forth legal moves and shouting-on-paper (or computer screen) outside responses are some of the clearest signs that 2000's Florida recount changed presidential elections — and even down-ballot races — for good.

So, in this instance, how did we get here?

As part of an ongoing court order, called a consent decree, in a case brought on behalf of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless (NEOCH) and following recent decisions relating to the state's provisional ballots, Husted on Friday issued a directive to county boards of elections on "Determining the Validity of Provisional Ballots and the Modified NEOCH Consent Decree." In it, an earlier designed form that the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the NEOCH case say gets the law wrong is again utilized.

Ohio election law states that the "the appropriate local election official shall record the type of identification provided" in this instance, but the form issued by Husted — and reissued on Friday — has a section labeled "MANDATORY INFORMATION REQUIRED FOR YOUR BALLOT TO COUNT" and within that section it states to the voter: "If you do not check one of the following boxes affirming the type of ID you showed to the precinct election official ... the board of elections will conclude that you did NOT show ID to your precinct election official and you must show ID at the board of elections during the 10 days after the election for your vote to be eligible to be counted."

It would appear that Husted's office has even indirectly acknowledged that the form is incorrect and that poll workers bear the responsibility here, with his lawyer stating in court in October that "the obligation to write down the identifying information is imposed upon the poll worker, not upon the voter," according to a portion of the hearing's transcript included in a recent court filing by the NEOCH lawyers.

Some answers should come on Monday, when Husted needs to provide a response about the issue to Judge Algenon Marbley, the Clinton-appointed judge overseeing the consent decree implementation. Judging from earlier litigation in Ohio this fall, an appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals would appear to be almost certain. (The votes from provisional ballots in Ohio can't even begin to be counted until Nov. 17, so the timing is not as immediate as it at first would seem — although boards can begin determining whether the provisional ballots themselves are valid as soon as the day after Election Day.)

In an area of the election process that only becomes relevant if the initial Election Day count is very close — Ohio's automatic recount provision only is triggered if the election is within 0.25 percent — even subsets of subsets of ballots could become The Deciding Factor.

In this context, any perceived change in the election process, particularly one made on the Friday afternoon before the election, is framed by partisans, such as Think Progress' Judd Legum, as eleventh-hour trickery.

As frustrating as this coverage can be for the casual observer, the problem with tracking election challenges is that, almost by its definition, everything can be crucial.

So, although provisional ballots were just more than 3.5 percent of Ohio ballots cast in 2008, and less than 1/5 of them were rejected, those rejected provisional ballots — 40,000 of them in 2008 — could be decisive should the state be closer than polling indicates.

Moreover, in this election, this numbers of provisional ballots cast are expected to be higher because Husted's office sent all voters absentee ballot applications and those voters who requested an absentee ballot but instead decide to vote in person on Election Day will be given a provisional ballot.

With Ohio seen as close to a must-win state as there is, a fight over any votes is a necessary one for both sides of the electoral divide. This weekend's squabble, moreover, is just a slight foreshadowing of the legal battles to come if Ohio or another state ends Election Day in a decisive electoral position and with a "too close to call" election.