Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP Senate candidate in Missouri, set off a firestorm today after claiming that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” don’t usually become pregnant because “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Now, several conservative writers have started calling for Akin to withdraw from his Senate race:

One of the first was Reihan Salam, a prominent author at the conservative flagship National Review:

Todd Akin ought to step the heck down.

— Reihan Salam (@reihan) August 19, 2012

John McCormack, a staff writer at Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, also called on Akin to step down:

.@rameshponnuru tried to warn us about Todd Akin nationalreview.com/corner/313005/… #headdesk

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) August 19, 2012

GOP political strategist Patrick Ruffini noted that former Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) withdrew from his reelection campaign after a scandal:

I think we may have a Torricelli situation here.

— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) August 19, 2012

Given his long history of political extremism, Akin’s views have long been out of step with the American political mainstream.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s recent decision to prohibit early voting on nights and weekends in all districts has many concerned about the effect on voter turnout in the state, particularly among low-income and minority communities. But one Republican Party chairman is content to suppress votes among this vulnerable demographic. Doug Preisse, chairman of the Republican Party in Franklin County, which contains the city of Columbus, admitted in an email to the Columbus Dispatch that black voters would now have a more difficult time voting:

I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine. Let’s be fair and reasonable.

Preisse was one of the board of elections members who blocked Democratic efforts in Franklin County to expand voting hours to evenings and weekends. According to the Dispatch, he called claims of unfairness “bullshit. Quote me!”

Preisse also served on Newt Gingrich’s leadership team in Ohio during the primary and is a top political consultant to Ohio governor John Kasich (R).

In 2008, 48 percent of early voters in Franklin County voted on nights or weekends. The Secretary of State has defended the move to cut hours across the state by pointing to his initiative sending absentee ballots to every registered voter. But according to a study by Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, black voters and Democrats prefer to cast their ballots in person, with 13.3 percent of black Ohioans casting early ballots in 2008 compared to just 8 percent of white voters.

Secretary of State Husted most recently suspended two Democratic members of the Montgomery County Election Board for voting to allow weekend voting in spite of the directive to restrict hours.

Though Mitt Romney has previously promised that he would balance the federal budget by 2020 — which would be the final year of his theoretical second term — his campaign has struggled to explain how his budget could do that and when it would really happen. Sunday, Romney senior campaign adviser Eric Fehrnstrom appeared to backtrack from the 2020 timetable promising only a $500 billion deficit reduction by the year 2016.

On CNN’s State of the Union, Fehrnstrom was asked how long it would take Romney to balance the budget:

JIM ACOSTA (HOST): So you’re not committing to balancing this budget by the end of the second term, because Governor Romney has said out on the campaign trail, that he hopes to have it balanced by the end of the second term. You’re not saying that, that’s not in the cards this morning?

FEHRNSTROM: I think that’s an achievable objective by the end of the the second term. What he has published is a deficit reduction plan that will cut the deficit by $500 billion by the year 2016.

Watch the video:

The reason Fehrnstrom cannot make the eight-years-to-a-balanced-budget claim is that Romney’s budget will not balance the budget and would likely make the deficit even larger. The decision by the Romney campaign to reject his own running mate’s $716 billion Medicare savings means that balancing the budget by 2020 — already a pipe dream under his original plan — is now so unrealistic that even his campaign won’t call it anything more than a potentially achievable objective.