Ny Safidinao

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco may be getting ready to shed its image as a city where anything goes, including clothing.   City lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on an ordinance that would prohibit nudity in most public places, a blanket ban that represents an escalation of a two-year tiff between a devoted group of men who strut their stuff through the city's famously gay Castro District and the supervisor who represents the area. Supervisor Scott Wiener 's proposal would make it illegal for a person over the age of 5 to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza" or while using public transit. A first offense would carry a maximum penalty of a $100 fine, but prosecutors would have authority to charge a third violation as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Exemptions would be made for participants at permitted street fairs and parades, such as the ci...

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Louisiana's Bobby Jindal is urging the Republican Party to rethink its pitch to voters. Bob McDonnell of Virginia says Republicans should look to outsiders to fix partisan gridlock in Washington. Their fellow governor, Wisconsin 's Scott Walker , says the next GOP leader must do a better job explaining why the party's policies will help ordinary Americans.   New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is holding court with admirers — and ignoring reporters as he ducks into nominally private meetings. And Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida is packing his bags for a very public trip to Iowa . Yes, the jockeying for 2016 has already begun. Less than two weeks after Republican nominee Mitt Romney came up short in his bid to unseat President Barack Obama , the next class of potential GOP presidential hopefuls is laying the groundwork for bids of their own. Some subtle and some overt, the maneuvering by would-be-candidates runs along a sometimes perilous path marked by donors,...

The presidential election is over, and now there are some cool tools to show just how Barack Obama won re-election. One that's getting plenty of attention on the Web is a new take on a familiar image — maps. The series of graphics show the election results illustrated by population , not geography. Republicans were surprised by the win . Many had assumed — wrongly — that young people wouldn't come out as much as they did in 2008. The New York Times graph shows that not only did Obama nab young voters, but also that the numbers of young voters who voted for Obama actually increased from 2008. While white male voters supported the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, Obama held his support with women, increased his support with Hispanic voters, and improved young voter turnout where it mattered: in the swing states. For serious political junkies, another graphic from the New York Times shows lots of fun facts about how voter groups since 1972 have swayed electi...

Spinners and Winners In his first national television interview since the 2012 election, Congressman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., better known as the vice presidential nominee, says losing came as something of a surprise. "We thought we had a very good chance of winning. You know, the polling and the data and all the people who are the smart people who watch this stuff -- they had a pretty optimistic view on the night," says Ryan. "So as you can imagine, it was a bit of a shock when we didn't win." But as soon as the final numbers on Virginia and Ohio began coming in, says Ryan, "we knew." In an interview earlier this week in Wisconsin, the congressman said one reason Obama won was because his campaign drove up turnout in urban areas. "I'll let the pundits decide exactly how he won," says Ryan. "The point is, he got more votes than we did. That's how he won." The voter turnout for Obama went beyond urban areas, the president a...

Petitions signed by hundreds of thousands of Americans   seeking permission for their states to peacefully secede from the union have now been filed for all 50 states on   the White House website . The secession petition push began last week on the site's   We The People section   after a Slidell, La., man  filed a petition on Nov. 7 to allow Louisiana to secede . Residents from other states followed suit. As of Wednesday afternoon,  North Carolina ,  Tennessee ,  Alabama ,  Georgia ,  Louisiana   and  Texas —all states that voted for former Gov. Mitt Romney—as well as  Florida   each had accumulated more than 25,000 signatures, the threshold needed to trigger an official response from the Obama administration. Collectively, the secession petitions now have more than 700,000 digital signatures. Texas is in the lead with more than 99,000, but Gov. Rick Perry said on Tuesday that he does not support secession. "Gov...

As conservatives search for an explanation for Mitt Romney's loss, much of the blame has been directed at the collapse of his campaign's Election Day get out the vote efforts, a massive organizational failure that resulted in lower Republican turnout than even John McCain got in 2008. A major source of Romney's GOTV problems appears to have been the disastrous Project ORCA, an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day. In the week leading up to the election, Romney campaign spokesperson Andrea Saul told Business Insider that ORCA was "the Republican Party’s newest, most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 election," touting it as the game-changer that would blow even the Obama campaign's sophisticated GOTV system out of the water. But on almost all counts, ORCA failed miserably. In a fascinating piece for Ace of...

Mitt Romney could have won. By Tuesday night, it was certain that 48 percent of the country no longer believed in the portrait of hope and change that Barack Obama offered up in 2008—if any ever had. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, the reality had grown somewhat repugnant to vast numbers of voters unhappy with a stagnant economy, even as Obama continued to portray himself as the good-guy savior (from George W. Bush , that is) in the White House.   But in the end, Obama secured a second historic election victory—in the face of staggering unemployment—largely because the alternative portrait that Romney presented to the country was far too incomplete. By failing to fill in critical details that would have fleshed out both his personality and his policies, the Republican challenger gave the American people a mere pencil sketch of a candidate. It wasn’t enough, and it was much too abstract. Too many voters couldn’t figure out which Romney would show up in the Oval Office. Would i...

An exit-poll data point that will surely haunt Mitt Romney and his party in weeks to come: If he had been able to draw half of voters under 30 in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, he would have won those states and the presidency.   The millennial generation — voters ages 18 to 29 — was widely expected to stay home on Election Day, deflated by partisan politics and disappointed by the president they overwhelmingly endorsed four years ago. Instead, young voters matched their participation rate from 2008, with about 50 percent of eligible voters under 30 casting ballots. More importantly, they actually increased their share of the electorate, from 18 percent in 2008 to 19 percent this year, surpassing the proportion of voters over the age of 65 (17 percent, according to CNN exit polls). And while President Obama 's support with this subset dropped from 66 percent to 60 percent, youth voters were a key part of the coalition that lifted him to a second term. “We’re treat...

As Election Day approaches, a review of polling data going back to 1936 shows the race between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is the closest in 76 years. In many cases, polling isn’t an exact science, and few polls take into account electoral votes, which ultimately decide the winner of the presidential race. But polls showing the projected popular vote are useful indicators of how the final election will turn out. In other words, polls about the popular vote don’t always pick the winner, but they usually do. And there hasn’t been a closer election in the polling world since the mid-1930s, when scientific methods were first used to project a presidential winner based on modern sampling techniques. As of Monday, President Obama has a very slim 0.4 percent lead in the popular vote based on consensus data from Real Clear Politics . Gallup suspended its national tracking polling last week after Hurricane Sandy, but its recent swing state poll shows Obama and Romney tied ...