Newt 40%, Romney 26% the long nightmare will continue.

What a difference a week can make. Romney has gone from being the inevitable candidate to losing by 14% in the GOP heartland. If Santorum ever had a chance of winning the nomination it was to beat Gingrich in South Carolina and consolidate the anti-Romney vote.

If the contest was being played by the 2008 rules Santorum would probably have to call it quits. This was meant to be Santorum country and he came in third with less than half the votes Gingrich got. But the GOP decided that the long drawn out 2008 contest was so good for Hilary and Obama that they wanted some of the same magic and so the early states are not allowed to have winner takes all races. Santorum will not win the nomination race but he might collect enough delegates to demand the Veep spot on the ticket.

Colbert/Cain only picked up 1% which is probably just as well. While it would have been funny as hell now if Colbert had managed to pick up a delegate or two it would be much less funny when Cain was directing their votes at the convention. Read the rest of this post...

Gingrich projected winner in South Carolina

Romney's momentum has stalled.  Rachel Maddow says we've never seen three different Republican candidates win Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.  Chris Matthews says that this is the same pattern we saw last year, with different GOP candidates surging to the lead, then falling back as another candidate surged.  Matthews says Romney needs to move to the right to recapture the momentum.  Which is trouble, since Romney's flip-flopper reputation is all due to his already having moved to the right in order to woo GOP voters.  Romney now regularly implies that President Obama is a socialist, something Romney had previously said he'd never do.  How many more flip-flops can Romney make in order to secure the GOP nomination?

Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress tweets: @igorvolsky: Only 20% of SC Evangelicals break for Santorum, most go with traditional values beacon Gingrich.

The religious right is pathetic, and a farce. They don't believe in God, values, the Bible or anything else they profess. How a born-again conservative Republican evangelical could vote for a guy who's been married three times, cheated on two different wives then married his mistress, twice, and reportedly asked wife number one for an open "free love" marriage with his then mistress, aka wife #2.

The Evangelical right doesn't believe in G-O-D. They believe in GOP. We've always known it. Tonight proves it.

Howie Kurtz raises a good point - perhaps the Evangelical dislike of Mormonism is greater than their distaste for a lot of adultery:

@HowardKurtz: CNN also says Newt leads Mitt 43-9 among those who say religion matters a great deal. Evangelical wariness of a Mormon candidate?

Brad Woodhouse over at the DNC chimes in about how significant a loss this is for Romney:

@woodhouseb: When's the last time someone collapsed this colossally? @MittRomney had a 25pt lead and right now is losing by 9 - a 34pt collapse.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic notes the irony of ABC's headline:

@DKThomp: "Ability to Beat Obama Tops S.C. Voters’ Concerns, According to Exit Polls" http://t.co/WWxzqC3z Hahahaha.

Excellent point. SC GOP voters voted for one of the most bombastic and hated men in America as their presidential candidate, over Mormon milquetoast (who certainly has a better chance at beating Obama than Gingrich), because their top concern is who can beat President Obama.

Southern voters' ability to vote against their own self-interest truly knows no bounds.

From the Borowitz Report:

@BorowitzReport: Gingrich leading Romney by 16%, which is more than Romney pays in taxes. #SCPrimary

And this one by Borowitz as well, is brilliant:

@BorowitzReport: BREAKING: Stung By Defeat, Romney Considers Adultery: http://t.co/VzyIemkb #SCPrimary

Read the rest of this post...

Romney brags about how he never held elected office... yeah, because he kept losing elections

You have to chuckle at Romney bragging that he's the only candidate who spent his entire life in the 'real world.' Yes, that's because for twenty some years now Romney has been trying, and failing, to win elected office. From The State:

"If we think we need a Washington insider to run Washington there are a lot of people to choose from, but I’m the only guy whose spent his life in the real world — I’m going to fight to put America back to work,” he said.

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What time do the polls close in South Carolina? 7pm Eastern

There should be exit poll data coming out now. Not regarding who people voted for, but rather who voted and why, what issues they care about. Read the rest of this post...

Romney’s lowered expectations

Back in the day when Al Gore was debating George W. Bush the establishment media told us that W. had won because he exceeded expectations and Gore did not. So W. was pronounced the 'winner' in the debates even despite demonstrating that he was ignorant and incompetent every time he opened his mouth. Now the establishment candidate is dropping like a rock in the polls, the media is rushing to set expectations as low as possible.

Only a week ago we were being told that Romney's inevitable victory in SC would wrap up the nomination and force the other contenders to quit the race. Now that expectation is scrubbed and we are being prepped to understand why a Gingrich win does not really count.

Curiously absent from the commentary is consideration of the reason for Romney's sudden collapse. The Republican primary voters have finally realized that Mr 0.01% is if anything less electable than Gingrich or Santorum.

Take a look at the picture of Bain Capital employees above (h/t Kevin Drum). Romney is the guy in the center with the Gordon Gecko grin. That is the first picture of Romney I have seen where I feel like I am seeing the real Romney.

Some things just can't be spun. It can be argued that like carrion crow, there is a place for vulture capitalists like Romney. But are American voters likely to decide that that place should be the White House? Read the rest of this post...

Romney trucking Mormon youth into SC to drum up fake "momentum"

Call it Mormentum.  It's what the Mormons did during Prop 8 in California as well.  In CA, they single-handedly turned a losing initiative to take marriage rights away from gay couples into a winner by trucking in a gazillion volunteers and then dropping $20 million into the campaign - and voila, civil rights were repealed.  Prepare for a lot more surreptitious Mormon meddling the further Romney goes.  From Buzzfeed:

But this wasn't a grassroots youth movement rooted at the University of South Carolina. No, many of the students cheering on the candidate told BuzzFeed they were actually BYU students and young Mormons from D.C. and Virginia who traveled to the Palmetto State to give their coreligionist's presidential effort a much-needed jolt of energy.

Kat Wardle, a 23-year-old BYU student who is spending the semester in Washington, D.C., said she and several young Latter-Day Saints have been following Romney around the state, playing the role of cheerleaders at various campaign stops.

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Chevron to appeal $18 billion ruling

Of course they're going to drag this out even longer. They asked for the trial to be moved from the US to Ecuador years ago but now can't live with the results. Isn't it interesting to see that when a corporate giant like Chevron drags out an expensive court case it's considered to be a normal business practice but when some poor slob sues a corporate giant or someone with deep pockets, it's abusing the system and clogging up the courts. OK, so which is it? Everyone is tired of the two weights, two measures but that's what continues to divide the 1% from the rest.

Chevron Corp has filed an appeal with Ecuador's Supreme Court to review a judgment that the U.S. oil company pay $18 billion in damages for polluting the Amazon jungle. An Ecuadorian judge ordered the U.S. major to pay the damages after a fraught legal battle that has lasted nearly two decades and looks like it will run even longer. The California oil company inherited the case when it bought Texaco a decade ago. Its appeal on Friday argued that the lower courts violated Ecuador's constitution by refusing to take corrective action in response to what Chevron calls "extensive fraud and corruption" committed by the plaintiffs' lawyers and representatives.

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The "leap second" lives!

I am disappointed to hear that the ITU has not killed one of the stupidest ideas in timekeeping at its meeting in London today. Instead the decision has been postponed to the 2015 meeting.

As you might have noticed, the earth is not a clock. While it takes the earth almost exactly 24 hours to revolve so that it is facing the sun in the same way the movement is not perfectly regular. Changes in the shape of the earth cause it to speed up or slow down. The tidal motion of the moon acts as a brake and slows it down very slightly. Lesson: do not attempt to use a very large, very heavy physical object as the basis for a precise system of measurement.

The discrepancy is less than a second per year but some people worry that over time these seconds might add up and cause some sort of catastrophe and so for the past fifty years the ITU has synchronized the UTC time count to the rotation of the earth by adding (and occasionally subtracting) leap seconds.

One consequence of this practice is that is not possible for computer systems to precisely calculate the number of seconds to any future date and time that is more than a year into the future. There might be 31,536,000 seconds between 00:00:00 on 21st January 2013 and 00:00:00 on 21st January 2014 or there might be 31536001. That type of unknown can cause major problems in planning systems.

Dealing with the leap second requires complex code and the ability to update the database of leap seconds. When two computer systems interact there is always a possibility of error being introduced because one is applying a correction and the other does not.

Astronomers have known about this problem for decades and that is why the astronomers I worked with at Oxford used International Atomic Time (TAI) rather than the error prone UTC. Using UTC in a scientific context is like using feet and inches to measure distances: Serious scientists just don't do it when it would make a difference.

If leap seconds are abolished it will take approximately 7200 years before the discrepancy between UTC and 'Universal Time' (time corrected to the rotation of the earth) reaches an hour. Why should this matter to anyone? According to current custom we move the clocks forwards and backwards by an hour twice a year. New York is not on the precise same longitude as Boston. In the early Victorian era, the two cities would have used different time as a matter of course. Today we ignore the difference because the social cost of maintaining separate local time would be huge, the value nil.

Attempting to determine longitude by using the equation of time has always required the use of correction factors. Depending on latitude the time of solar noon varies by several minutes over the course of a year in any case. The orbit of the earth is not circular and the rotation of the earth is tilted with respect to its orbit.

The leap second is an archaic notion that has absolutely no practical value and causes real practical difficulties. The ITU should have had the guts to kill it off, instead they procrastinated. Read the rest of this post...

The Beat - Pato & Roger A Go Talk

It's a gray and rainy Saturday over here. Last weekend we visited the Cézanne et Paris exhibit here in Paris and loved it. Our (retired art professor) friend explained how Cézanne really developed the Cézanne that we know during his time in Paris, before moving to the south where he produced his classics. Besides finding the exhibit itself interesting, I also enjoyed seeing that his time around Paris was often in the villages that are on my cycling route outside of town. I have not yet seen the bridge in Maincy that was a turning point for his painting style but I've been very close. It's in the area of one of my favorite rides that starts and finishes in Melun along the Seine. The bridge is not too far from the lovely Château de Vaux le Vicomte which has it's own interesting history. But back to Cézanne and his painting, Maincy is when he finally moved on from impressionism, which was never really his comfort zone. It was Cézanne who after centuries of adding depth to painting, flattened the canvas and opened the door to modern art. Now I need to get our friends back up to Paris again for my next art history lesson. For the art history specialists out there, please correct or add more to the story of Cézanne. It was a crash course so I may have missed some points last weekend. Read the rest of this post...

Greek debt restructuring nearly finished. Again.

OK, so now the financiers are about to take a haircut to the tune of 70% rather than the earlier 50% but does anyone honestly think this will resolve the problem? The only likely final outcome is default, but there will be plenty of dancing around and more delaying (after years of delay) before they will finally get there. The financiers have only themselves to blame because they were greedy. There's a slim possibility that they could have made it through back in 2008 had they accepted debt reductions along these lines but even then, it was going to be difficult.

Greece is on the verge of a breakthrough in talks with its creditors that could wipe out up to 70% of its debts and alleviate the crisis in the eurozone. An outline deal, hurriedly endorsed by Brussels, came after a frantic three days of negotiations that at one time appeared to be heading for deadlock. It appeared that Greece had secured a deal to pay an interest rate of 3.1%, rising to 4.75%, on new 30-year bonds created from its outstanding €360bn (£300bn) debt burden. The effect would be for creditors to accept writedowns of up to 70% on many of their loans.

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