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Meghan McCain said she respects the Republican Party, but wants to make clear: Some GOPers are crazy rednecks. She’s just not one of them. In an interview with Politico, she also tried to make clear that she’s not a voice for young Republicans. “I don’t espouse myself to be the voice of young Republicans at all

Orca Spotted with Plastic Bag in Mouth Researchers snapped a picture of a baby killer whale in the Pacific Northwest holding a plastic bag in its mouth, just the latest example of plastic pollution in the world's oceans. Last month, scientists from the Center for Whale Research monitoring orcas in the Salish Sea say they spotted a calf playing with what at first looked like a small scrap of blubber. When the baby whale dropped the item from its mouth, they realized it was actually a plastic bag.

Anthony Weiner’s online paramour took time out from her “15 Minutes of Fame” tour to cool off on a Santa Monica beach — looking more like a frumpy schoolmarm than sultry sext kitten. Sydney Leathers — who sent Weiner a racy, bun-baring shot of herself in a pink thong during their 6-month dalliance — sported this unflattering two-piece halter bathing suit with high-waisted, cover-it-all-up bottoms late last week.

<p>The dolphin was originally part of a small group swimming off the Mexican coast But the others managed to get away - leaving it at the mercy of a whole pod of whales With the setting sun just beginning to turn the sky pink, a killer whale leaps out of the ocean and soars into the air, spray cascading down in its wake.</p>

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities: "What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . ....

The GOP is working with Silicon Valley investors to digitally target voters and donors in a broader effort by the Republican National Committee to revive the party. The venture, whose mission is still being refined, will create an interactive platform available to any GOP campaign to access the party's vast amount of data on voters. This platform will likely work in conjunction with the RNC's efforts to improve its own database of voter information. The venture is being backed by Karl Rove and fomer Bain & Co. executive and private equity investor Richard Boyce. Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy will...

A pod of killer whales appears to be trapped in a small pool of water surrounded by ice in Hudson’s Bay. In a number of videos shot by local residents near Inukjuak, Que., the whales are seen taking turns continuously coming up for air. The first video was posted on Tuesday on Facebook by local residents to try to get the attention of authorities to help the whales who appear to be in distress. It is believed the orcas became stranded on Monday and are still there.

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else. They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and...

Many things went wrong with Romney's campaign for president, but one of the biggest was the epic failure of the campaign's big-data app for getting out the vote, called Orca. When the campaign needed it most, Orca was beached. Politico has an excellent summary of the problems it says that Orca had. Among them were that the Romney campaign kept it secret and didn't beta-test it before it was rolled out on Election Day. That meant that the people who it was designed for -- the thousands of volunteers across the country -- didn't have a chance to learn how...

Mitt Romney's Republican Get Out the Vote system (ORCA) had a meltdown on Election Day leaving some campaign workers wandering around with nothing to do. Now Anonymous has released a video claiming responsibility for jamming ORCA...

Worse still, Ekdahl told Business Insider that the Romney campaign failed to provide poll-watching volunteers in his region — Jacksonville, Florida, a key Republican city in a major swing state — with proper credentials and accurate voter strike lists, rendering them unable to perform their duties even if the ORCA app had worked. In interviews with Business Insider last week, sources close to the Romney campaign confirmed Ekdahl's account, and described a technological undertaking that failed at every level. According to several of these sources, ORCA was developed by a small, isolated tech team working under Romney's political team. These...

I was one of those 30,000 around the country that wasted their day this past Tuesday trying to get Orca to work. Here in central Virginia, it was as bad as everything you've heard. I slugged it out with Boston from 6:30 am to 7 pm, and tried every way I could think of to make it work, probably for no good purpose. The "app" itself couldn't be used ahead of time, I was assigned to go to one precinct on Tuesday, then got contrary instructions on Wednesday (the week before the election), was invited to call into a conference...

Romney’s Get Out the Vote Fiasco Bethany Mandel 11.09.2012 The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.” The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way...

If you spend your time watching politics and haven’t been hiding in a deep depression since Tuesday, you’ve probably been hearing a lot about “ORCA.” According to the Washington Post, ORCA “was designed as a first-of-its-kind tool to employ smartphones to mobilize voters, allowing them to microtarget which of their supporters had gone to the polls.” There is now widespread condemnation of the program as being sloppy and poorly deployed.

The Wednesday before the election, Mitt Romney sent a special message to volunteers about a special project his campaign was working on: “With state of the art technology and an extremely dedicated group of volunteers, our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on election day.” What is it they say about something that sounds too good to be true? It probably is. That was the case with the Romney campaign’s “Project ORCA.” The idea behind Project ORCA was simple, albeit far too complex in execution. Romney’s Boston headquarters wanted a way to track who had been to the polls in...

COULD THIS BE WHAT HAPPENED IN WISCONSIN POLLING PLACES?>>READ THE FOLLOWING ACCOUNT, AND WATCH uncovered hearing video about how it may have been achieved.

As Republicans try to explain their Election Day losses in terms of policy, tactics, and strategy, one factor is emerging as the essential difference between the Obama and Romney campaigns on November 6: the absolute failure of Romney’s get-out-the-vote effort, which underperformed even John McCain’s lackluster 2008 turnout. One culprit appears to be “Orca,” the Romney’s massive technology effort, which failed completely. ... Likewise, Twitchy recorded widespread real-time complaints and criticisms on Twitter by Project Orca volunteers. At one point during Election Day, the system had malfunctioned so badly that desperate volunteers wondered if the program had been hacked. ......

What is Project Orca? Well, this is what they told us: "Project ORCA is a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election." Pretty much everything in that sentence is false. The "massive undertaking" is true, however. It would take a lot of planning, training and coordination to be done successfully (oh, we'll get to that in a second). This wasn't really the GOP's effort, it was Team Romney's. And perhaps "unprecedented" would fit if we're discussing failure.

Much was made in the closing days of the election about the GOP's "Project ORCA", a Smartphone-linked network of volunteers who would enable the party to know who had voted in real time, allowing them to target their resources on election day to people and area who had NOT yet voted or had low turnout. It was a brilliant idea, and I know for a fact that when the Dems found out about it, there was some grave concern from a number of them. Well, here in Virginia my wife volunteered, participated in three training calls, plus online training -...

Extraordinary pictures of orca surfing the wake of a boat off the coast of Mexico show the marine mammals playing in jet bubbles and chasing down a yacht. A fishing company from Loreto, Mexico, runs charters off the Baja Coast. Cast ‘n Reel owner Ashley Ross said it was “magical” to be able to snap the shots they did about a month ago. “As far as we know this is the first time orcas have surfed the wake of a boat here in Loreto. “They never played so closely to us. They usually keep their distance until we turn...