As I assumed would happen, the Republicans in charge are focusing on the counties in the ‘official election probe’.

There is apparently no need to look at the attempt to implement a last minute purge of voters lists, or the effect of padding the ballot with 11 constitutional amendments, but they might look to see if cutting the early voting to 8 days from 14 could have affected something.

I can save them some time – St Lucie County had equipment problems, so they had to recount some ballots to ensure accuracy. I realize that wanting to have an accurate count is a foreign concept for Republicans, but some people believe in it.

It doesn’t take much of a ‘probe’ to figure out that the three largest counties in the state are going to take the longest to count ballots, and when it takes someone a half-hour or more to read and mark the ballot, you are going to have a problem.

If the Republicans actually wanted any of those amendments to pass they would have put them on an off-year primary ballot when the turn-out was low and more Republicans than Democrats would be likely to vote. The only reason for putting them on the general election ballot was to screw up the system, and everyone paying attention knows it.

The BBC reports that Omnishambles has been named word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary. We used to say FUBAR [F***ed Up Beyond Any Recognition] in the military, but Omnishambles is more polite.

This was just in time as the Austerians have managed to push the Eurozone back into recession, just as John Maynard Keynes said would happen around three-quarters of a century ago. Omnishambles is useful in describing what Merkel et al. have done to the economy in Europe.