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- These Daily Kos community posts were the most shared on Facebook November 3:
Perhaps the biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats, by akadjian
University President Emeritus of Fort Hays State Contends KS-GOP Fraudulently Represented Him, by tmservo433
AP Exclusive: Ferguson no-fly zone was deliberate effort to obstruct media coverage of protests, by bobswern
It's that time of cycle again! Every election, dating back to our days at the Swing State Project, Daily Kos Elections has hosted a prediction contest, and the winners always receive delicious chocolate babka from Green's Bakery.
This year, we're asking you to pick the winners in all of the races that we've rated as Tossups as of Friday morning. In a new twist, we're also asking you to select what you think will be the closest race nationwide (in percentage terms) in each category: Senate, gubernatorial, and House. And finally, as a tie-breaker, we want you to guess the vote share of each of the candidates in South Dakota's wacky four-way Senate election.
- Five reasons your pollworker may have no clue. They aren't enough of them, they aren't trained, they aren't required to meet minimum standards, they are old (which often means they aren't up on the new voting technology) and they get paid poorly:
Poll workers [...] have immense power that far surpasses their standing in the local election bureaucracy. They often make decisions about whether an individual can vote and whether that vote actually gets counted—recall the infamous Florida "hanging chads" during the 2000 presidential election recount. Often they make these decisions poorly, and the people who bear the brunt of those bad decisions are disproportionately African-American and Latino, who often face chronically understaffed polling stations that lack trained workers and those who are bilingual.
Why were dinosaurs covered in a cloak of feathers long before the early bird species Archaeopteryx first attempted flight? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the University of Göttingen attempt to answer precisely that question in their article "Beyond the Rainbow" in the latest issue of the journal Science. The research team postulates that these ancient reptiles had a highly developed ability to discern color. Their hypothesis: The evolution of feathers made dinosaurs more colorful, which in turn had a profoundly positive impact on communication, the selection of mates and on dinosaurs' procreation.
The most alarming of these revelations is that the Bureau is reading the emails of people—they don't know how many people—without court orders.
The FBI does this under what have been called "backdoor searches." When the feds collect content from people overseas who are suspected of terrorism or spying, they dump that into a database that the FBI can (and does) query when it gets tips. Director [James] Comey said in response to a question after his speech at the Brookings Institution last month that this only happens "pursuant to an investigation." But that's not true--FBI's personnel can access Americans' emails even before they start a formal investigation.
The entire legislative branch will be run by politicians whose campaigns are overwhelmingly aligned with the fossil fuel companies, and who are perfectly content to resign the world to burn if it keeps them in office. Granted, Democrats have been ineffectual, toothless, and often eager to join the denier ranks to keep the oil cash flowing in—but at least they are not united in a will to deny the basic tenets of science.
All of this is to say: There's still time. Vote today, and if you don't have time to look into whether your candidates are climate-change deniers, you can safely assume—I'm not kidding, the effective science denial is close to unanimous—that a vote for the Republican Party is a vote to consign the future to swelter.
- On today's Kagro in the Morning rerun, we rounded up 2013's election results with Greg Dworkin & Joan McCarter. Debunking Obamacare horror stories. What turned out to be the last pre-nuclear option filibuster fight. Big Coal's black lung cover-up. GunFAIL out of Waco.