Election 2012

The "money quote" from the weekend's Boston Globe account of the "Story Behind Mitt Romney's Loss":

President Obama's nomination of Democrat John Kerry to be secretary of state sets off a chain of events that could put another Kennedy in the Senate, at least on an interim basis.

And it gives ousted Republican Scott Brown a fighting chance of returning to the Senate by midyear.

On Friday, Obama nominated Kerry, the senior senator from Massachusetts, to replace Hillary Clinton as the nation's chief diplomat. A 27-year veteran of the Senate and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry should win easy Senate confirmation early in the new year.

Republicans increased their numbers at the poll by more than 60,000 this year, while the number of Democrats decreased by 53,000. And the four groups with the highest voter turnout in the state were Republicans, African Americans, women and senior citizens. That's according to Democracy North Carolina, a voting rights group that analyzed the voter turnout data released by the State Board of Elections last week. 

If President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner's closed-door meetings aimed at solving the fiscal cliff crisis trouble anyone, you'd expect it to be the open-government watchdogs who routinely bark their outrage at public officials who work overtime to avoid public scrutiny.