mimblr.com

The story is largely set in Doylestown, one of Philly's oldest and most picturesque exurbs. It's a swing town in a swing area in a crucial swing state. As such, the political trends in Doylestown and the rest of Bucks County are pretty indicative of what's going on throughout Pennsylvania and the rest of the country.
The article is subscription-only on our website (so become a subscriber!), but I'm posting an edited excerpt below for the loyal readers of this blog.
Doylestown, like much of Bucks County , used to be deeply, proudly, Republican. "In my youth, in central Bucks County , I grew up without knowing any Democrats," James Michener wrote in Report of the County Chairman, his account of volunteering for John F. Kennedy in 1960. "My mother thought there might be some on the edge of town, but she preferred not to speak of them." Things began to change in 1992, when the recession that year pushed Bucks County toward Bill Clinton . In the following years, as the GOP increasingly became identified with the religious right , the county voted for Democrats for President. Yet until recently, Republicans controlled all the levers of local government.
A surge of Democratic activism in the past few years has turned Doylestown, and much of the county, from red to purple–and quite possibly to blue. In 2003 Republicans dominated the borough council 9-0; now it's 6-3 Democratic. After sending Republicans to Congress in every election since 1993, in 2006 Bucks County's 8th Congressional District elected Democrat Patrick Murphy , a 34-year-old Iraq War vet . In January there were 21,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in Bucks. By early April, thanks to a massive voter-registration drive, Democrats outnumbered Republicans for the first time since 1978, when Democrats briefly held sway after Watergate .

news.yahoo.com

With 80 search warrants in hand for DNA samples and other evidence, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said he was set to conduct a sweeping raid on a secretive polygamous clan in 2006.
Instead, Shurtleff changed his mind and clan leaders quickly made themselves scarce. He made the disclosure in an interview with KTVX-TV in Salt Lake City.
“We elected not to do that and to try and work with their attorney,” Shurtleff said of the Kingston family, a 1,500-member group based in the Salt Lake City area that has a wide range of businesses, from pawn shops to dairies and a coal mine.
“And, of course, the result of that was all our subjects disappeared, our targets disappeared and we didn’t get the warrants served like we hoped to do,” Shurtleff told the TV station Tuesday.
An investigator who worked the case seemed shocked by the attorney general’s disclosure.
“I am not going to comment on an investigation I still believe is viable,” said Jim Hill, who now heads up a crime lab for Salt Lake City police.
An attorney for the Kingston family, Daniel Irvin, said Shurtleff was seeking DNA in an effort to prove incest was occurring inside the clan.
Irvin said he sought to get the warrants quashed in court as violation of the Kingston family’s civil rights. He didn’t succeed but said the warrants were never served.
“We considered going in a similar SWAT-type — I guess for lack of a better word — operation into a church meeting and bar the doors and start collecting evidence,” Shurtleff told KTVX.
But Irvin said the Kingston clan doesn’t maintain any central location where members gather.
“They all live in little homes around the (Salt Lake) valley and the state. There’s no compound, so where do you go with the SWAT team?” he told The Associated Press.

deseretnews.com