Plouffe: For GOP, anything short of sweep would be 'colossal failure' - Washington Post

Trying to reshape expectations for the midterm elections, David Plouffe said Thursday that the Republicans should be expected to make a full sweep of Congress - and key gubernatorial races - given the environmental advantages they have. Anything less, he said, should be seen as a disgrace.

"By their definition, success is winning back the House, winning back the Senate and winning every major governor's race," Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager, said. "When you've got winds this strong in your favor, that's the kind of election you need to have - or it should be considered a colossal failure."

Three weeks out, both parties are in a mad scramble to define what success would look like on Election Day. Although Republicans held a significant lead last month, it has appeared to narrow some, and whichever party winds up controlling Congress might do so by a narrow margin. Democrats would like to be considered winners if they merely hang on to the Senate, which some strategists in both parties expect them to do.

Plouffe, speaking to reporters at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, argued that Democrats are turning their trajectory around and are poised, 26 days out, to fare better Nov. 2 than it appeared they would last month.

But he said he expected Democrats to "show progress gradually," in contrast with Republicans who have "maxed out or close to it."

Plouffe, a key Democratic Party strategist, also embraced the tea party surge as a welcome development for the Democrats, calling it the "hijacking of the Republican Party."

kornbluta@washpost.com ruckerp@washpost.com

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Obama won't sign bill that would affect foreclosure proceedings - Washington Post

Amid growing furor over the legitimacy of foreclosure proceedings, White House officials said Thursday that President Obama will not sign a bill passed by Congress without public debate after critics said the legislation could loosen standards for foreclosure documents.

The bill, named the Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act, would require courts to accept document notarizations made out of state. Its sponsors intended to promote interstate commerce. But homeowner advocates warn the bill could allow lenders to cut even more corners as they seek to evict homeowners.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president did not believe Congress meant to undermine consumer protections regarding foreclosure challenges. Still, Obama will use a "pocket veto" on the bill, which will effectively kill it.

Democratic leaders on the Hill were scrambling to figure out how the legislation managed to sail through the House and Senate without any objection. The episode may prove embarrassing for Democrats, who in recent weeks have been calling for federal investigations into flawed paperwork, forged documents and other misconduct in foreclosure proceedings initiated by big lenders.

The House passed the bill in April by a voice vote, meaning there's no record of who voted for or against the legislation. The Senate passed the bill on Sept. 27, just before recess, without any debate.

Even the bill's main sponsor, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.), was surprised by how quickly the legislation was greenlighted, according to D.J. Jordan, a representative for Aderholt.

Congressional staffers said lawmakers will revisit the bill to add protections for consumers.

Jordan said Aderholt had been working on the issue since April 2005, soon after hearing complaints from a court stenographer in his district that courts in other states were having trouble using documents notarized in Alabama.

"The authors of this bill no doubt had the best of intentions in mind when trying to remove impediments to interstate commerce," said Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director. "We will work with them and other leaders in Congress to explore the best ways to achieve this goal going forward."

This would be Obama's second pocket veto. Last December, he killed a short-term resolution that turned out to be unnecessary for extending defense funding.

Obama's veto comes as the uproar over document processing from lawmakers, law enforcement and union officials and other stakeholders intensified on Thursday, turning the foreclosure mess into a political issue.

National civil rights groups, including the NAACP, National Council of La Raza and the Center for Responsible Lending, joined labor unions Thursday in calling for an immediate national moratorium on foreclosures.

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Twitter Revamps Search Engine - PC World

Twitter has overhauled the back-end infrastructure of its search engine, boosting its speed and capacity to index posts, process queries and deliver results, while making the system more stable and better suited for the addition of new features.

Twitter transferred its search engine to the new platform in recent weeks, after working on the new back-end system for about six months, according to the company.

Twitter's search engine ran on a system based on MySQL from Summize, a company Twitter acquired in mid-2008, but scaling up the system had become difficult.

The engineering team in charge of the project decided to do an extreme makeover of the search engine using a different technology: the open-source, text search engine Lucene, which is written in Java.

Twitter modified some aspects of Lucene, including its garbage collection, query termination, posting lists, and data structures and algorithms, and was left with an inverted, index-based search engine that scales much more and has better performance.

Twitter fields 12,000 search queries per second -- or more than 1 billion per day -- and "tweets" become part of its search index less than 10 seconds after they are posted.

"We estimate that we're only using about 5 percent of the available backend resources, which means we have a lot of headroom. Our new indexer could also index roughly 50 times more Tweets per second than we currently get," Twitter official Michael Busch wrote in a blog post.

Twitter will contribute back to the Lucene project the modifications and improvements it made to the code.

Although Twitter makes available its index of "tweets" to external search engines like Google and Microsoft's Bing, its internal search engine is a key component of its microblogging service.

In addition to being the preferred vehicle among private citizens, public figures and companies for broadcasting short status updates, Twitter has become an increasingly valued repository of real-time data, tapped for following news, trends and collective musings.

To maximize the value of this "tweet" repository, the company must have a search engine that is fast, comprehensive and scalable, and its massive revamping of its search technology shows the company recognizes the importance of its internal search capabilities.

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