Mitt Romney

By Steve Young Remember the winter Sundays of gridiron excitement that we scheduled our lives around? Remember October, filling South Philly with dreams of Broad Street victory parades? Remember the 7-footer we chucked Andre Iguodala for? Remember hockey? Neither do I. But Philadelphia sports held no monopoly on failure last year. 2012 buried the nation under an embarrassment of bad choices and ready-made punch lines. A presidential primary season filled with imploding candidates made it easy for late-night comedians.

Happy holidays. My gift to you is a 2012 election trivia quiz. No fair peeking at the answers!   1. Which lies did Mitt Romney utter repeatedly on his way to defeat? a. President Obama was trying to "gut" the federal welfare-to-work law. b. Obama had a "Kenyan, anticolonial worldview. " c. Obama's auto bailout was sending auto jobs from Ohio to China. d. Obama traveled the world on an "apology tour. " e. Obama engineered "a government takeover of health care.

The parents of the Charles Carroll High School student ridiculed and told by her teacher to remove a T-shirt supporting Mitt Romney in this year's presidential campaign sued the teacher and the School District on Friday, claiming the act violated the girl's civil rights. Filed in federal court in Philadelphia, the suit says the district ignored Samantha Pawlucy's right to free speech, let other students threaten and harass her and subjected her "to emotional distress, simply because she exercised her First Amendment rights.

Steve Welch was a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate this year The Sunday morning before the election, my daughter and I attended a candidates' breakfast in Chester County. The room was packed with passionate Republican volunteers. The energy level bordered on exuberance, as people believed Pennsylvania was in play in the presidential race. In fact, one ardent political operative for the Pennsylvania Pastors Network told me he believed Mitt Romney would likely win Pennsylvania by 10 points.

NEW HAVEN, CONN. - Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, has released his seventh annual list of the most notable quotations of the year. The original "Yale Book of Quotations" was published in 2006, and Shapiro has updated it with an annual list of the top-10 quotes. Shapiro picks quotes that are famous, important or revealing of the spirit of the times, not necessarily ones that are the most eloquent or admirable. Here's the list: 1. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what . . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims . . . These are people who pay no income tax . . . and so my job is not to worry about those people.

Good news for Mitt Romney! Contrary to early vote counts, based solely on computerized returns from Philadelphia's voting machines, he did not get blanked in 59 of the city's 1,687 voting divisions. A groundswell of support among people voting by absentee and provisional ballots reduced the number of divisions where Romney received zero votes to 50. In addition, the certified results show 99 divisions where Romney was supported by exactly one voter. - Bob Warner   At Great Wall, Nutter saw a Rocky fist pump First day in China, Mayor Nutter and three others - Nancy Gilboy, president of the International Visitors Council of Philadelphia, and Nutter aides Suzanne Biemiller and Duane Bumb - do the tourist thing and go to the Great Wall.

WASHINGTON - Campaign finance filings with the government now show that the cost of the 2012 U.S. presidential race has surpassed $2 billion, a new record. The filings to the Federal Election Commission released Thursday, which include nearly $86 million in fund-raising by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in the election's final weeks, boosted the total campaign haul over the $2 billion mark. The campaign's record-breaking expenditures on media ads were fueled by eye-popping amounts donated to "super" political action committees, including at least $95 million supporting Romney and other Republicans that came from a billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate.

Not a job for Romney The suggestion by Matt Miller that Mitt Romney chair a commission to "analyze" us out of the national health-care challenge is an idea that won't die ("This is a job for Mitt Romney," Monday). First, it was suggested that Romney be appointed to an economic commission, and now this. On the health-care panel, each commissioner would be given the task of stepping "beyond parochial concerns to address these questions in the context of the broader national interest.

By Matt Miller I have just the thing if President Obama was serious about asking Mitt Romney to "work together to move this country forward. " Romney was a world-class management consultant with a legendary appetite for "the data. " His private-equity success was due partly to his knack for identifying and purging inefficiencies from bloated, underperforming enterprises. It's time, therefore, to set him loose (analytically speaking) on the mother of all domestic challenges: America's radically inefficient health-care system.

WASHINGTON - Three weeks after the election, Mitt Romney made it to the White House. For about 90 minutes. Over a private lunch on Thursday, President Obama and Romney had some white turkey chili, Southwestern grilled chicken salad and - from the reports of it - the kind of actual conversation that never happens while two presidential nominees are bashing each other's ideas during a campaign. They shook hands in the Oval Office. They spoke of American leadership in the world. They pledged to keep in touch.