colour me gobsmacked: Time-CNN poll has Gingrich at 33 to Romney at 20 in Iowa

The numbers are here for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida, the four early primary states where Gingrich holds commanding double digit leads in 3 of the 4. The core premise of Willard Mitt Romney’s campaign was a divided conservative base that would allow him to develop momentum by means of early primary victories in the form of electoral pluralities. So now he is suddenly where he never wanted to be: in a head to head struggle against a perceived conservative candidate going into Iowa with the conservative base rapidly consolidating its position both locally in the early primary states and nationally.

You may as well try to fly.

the anti-campaign of the anti-campaigner

[Willard Mitt Romney's] Hopes for wrapping up the nomination with a quick-strike victory, which would require a strong showing in Iowa, are fading, write Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman and Reid J. Epstein for POLITICO.com in a story titled Gingrich surge prompts Romney reboot

Martin, Haberman, and Epstein continue:

Romney’s comments effectively marked a public concession that the play-it-safe approach he’s held to so far this year – limiting his interviews and doing only modest amounts of retail campaigning – simply won’t cut it anymore [...]

wintery knight: “So Romney is saying to Republican voters ‘never mind what I am saying in my own words in those videos, just read my book instead’”

Wintery Knight concludes his post titled Mitt Romney gaffe: Romney fails miserably in interview with Bret Baier: “Is this thin-skinned RINO the person we want in the Oval office in 2012? Why elect a clone of Obama?”

Romney tells Baier his interview was overly aggressive:

Romney-Baier interview part 1

Commentary:

2012 becomes reprise of 2008 in Iowa for Willard Mitt Romney

Willard Mitt Romney’s Agony in Iowa of 2008 where Romney lost the state to a man with no money, and no organization, after spending 6 months on the ground and $US11m is about to repeat itself.

At first blush, a poll showing Mitt Romney trailing Newt Gingrich among likely Iowa caucus goers shouldn’t be too worrying for the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign. There’s been a steady ebb and flow of chief competitors this fall and, although Romney recently started investing heavily in the state he long ignored, Iowa was never going to be the battleground on which Romney’s candidacy won or died. But the internals of a new Washington Post/ABC News poll showing Gingrich with a robust lead hint at a potentially broader problem: Voters there simply haven’t been buying what he’s been selling, writes Adam Sorenson in a Time magazine Swampland post titled Romney’s Message Not Taking Root in Iowa

Romney had earlier ceded the state only to discover that without it he could lose New Hampshire.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign has been worried about Iowa from the beginning. The Hawkeye State cost Romney real blood and treasure in his 2008 bid, and his team was wary of trying again after it became obvious his ceiling was so low, writes Reid Wilson in a National Journal 2012 Decoded blog burst titled The Last Temptation of [Willard] Mitt [Romney].

Wilson continues:

[...] But if Romney’s ceiling is somewhere around 25 percent, he might want to revisit that initial skepticism. All indications are that Newt Gingrich is uniting a significant portion of the Republican electorate; an ABC News/Washington Post poll out today shows Gingrich at 33 percent among likely caucus-goers, while Romney and Rep. Ron Paul are tied at 18 percent. That’s a bigger lead than Gingrich enjoyed in a Des Moines Register poll (Gingrich 25 percent, Paul 18, Romney 16) and an NBC News/Marist poll (Gingrich 26, Romney 18, Paul 17) released over the weekend [...]

yours &c.
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Mark Hosenball of Reuters: “Romney staff spent nearly $100,000 [in state taxpayer's money] to hide records”

[...] The cleanup of records by Romney’s staff before his term ended included spending $205,000 for a three-year lease on new computers for the governor’s office, according to official documents and state officials, writes Mark Hosenball in a Reuters release titled Romney staff spent nearly $100,000 to hide records

What is in the hole? 

Hosenball continues:

In signing the lease, Romney aides broke an earlier three-year lease that provided the same number of computers for about half the cost – $108,000. Lease documents obtained by Reuters under the state’s freedom of information law indicate that the broken lease still had 18 months to run. 

As a result of the change in leases, the cost to the state for computers in the governor’s office was an additional $97,000 [...]

The emphasis is mine. All mine.

Is The Fate Of Mitt Romney’s Presidential Campaign In The Hands Of A Reuters FOIA Request?, asks Brian Paul in a Zero Hedge blog comment on the Reuters release.

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Romney losing key electoral bridgehead in the interior West: polls show Gingrich in double digit in Colorado where Romney easily defeated McCain in 2008

Newt Gingrich’s recent surge has extended to Colorado, where a new poll of GOP primary voters has the former Speaker of the House well ahead of his rivals, Poll shows Gingrich ahead of Romney in Colorado, writes Eli Stokols for kwgn.com in a story titled Poll shows Gingrich ahead of Romney in Colorado

Meanwhile, at Team Romney headquarters … 

Stokols continues:

The news has to concern Romney, who easily defeated John McCain in Colorado’s 2008 presidential caucus and has long looked at this interior west state as friendly terrain [...]

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“‘This is a very poor media operation,’ one political director for a leading cable news network complained to POLITICO” [about the Willard Mitt Romney campaign]

[...] The Romney team’s MO has been to pursue softball coverage in lieu of potentially dangerous interviews. He agreed to interviews with soft-lens magazines like Parade and People, but not with newsmagazines or websites, or even with The Boston Globe reporters who are writing a biography of the candidate. He has avoided The New York Times as well, and his only policy-oriented interview — foreign policy, exclusively — with The Washington Post was granted to blogger Jennifer Rubin, who holds similar views, writes Dylan Byers of POLITICO.com in a story titled Mitt’s media blowback

Byers continues:

Romney also avoids reporters’ questions on the trail. When confronted by a Times reporter about this, he countered that he had press avails “almost every day” — a preposterous stretch of the word “almost.” (In fact, the reporter noted, Romney’s most recent press avail had been nearly a week earlier.)

While tight message control has often made it seem as though he is on a glide path to the nomination, the fallout from the Baier interview also signaled that a backlash is always close [...]

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NYC’s population density is about 26,000 people per square mile; Occupy Wall Street protesters active in the financial district of New York City number about 4,000 with Philadelphia’s Occupy protest a distant second at about 430 protesters

Say the Wall Street Occupiers concentrate their numbers on a few city blocks as tactical and organizational necessity would predict. Based on these numbers they would account for about a 15% increase in population but only in the area that they occupy—well, maybe, because my calculations are rough and based on Wikipedia numbers, and on any given business day the population of New York City’s financial district increases to about 300,000 workers. So in the mornings and afternoons when most of Manhattan rises to its feet to travel along the sidewalks to or from the bus stops, train stations, or parking garages, the Occupier formations would hardly rise to the threshold of most peoples perception unless the Occupiers got deliberately in the way of pedestrian traffic. (This, however, I would notice immediately.)

Here be the numbers of Occupy Wall Street protesters by location as reported by the Washington Post in the form of a table.

Caption: Lost in the crowd

U.S. productivity continues its decline, which means declining wages, salaries, living standards, and revenues at every level

As I wrote before about productivity, you cannot pay workers more than they produce. Nor can you invest capital when it returns a loss, which is what a failure to produce, or a decline in productivity, means on its face.

To use a humble agrarian metaphor, imagine you sowed seed that performed at a 1 to 1 ratio, 1 seed given for 1 seed planted, or even a 1 to 2 ratio. At this level of productivity you would starve, because your stock would diminish with each cycle as you consumed or traded some of it. It is the surplus production–or relatively high productivity–of cereal grains that permits sedentary agriculture to persist. Coda: Our capital stock and labour investment in the aggregate now returns a declining yield, which is what a declining productivity means. Hence, we’re starving, a starvation that takes the form of an economy in a free fall.

This isn’t economic principle at stake; this is an immutable law of physics.

Caption: Desolation is the new black

alleged “researcher”: Tea Partiers are terrorist suicide-cultists who would bring the whole system down on our heads, yet they fear change; Tea Partiers value deference to authority, yet they’re libertarian government-haters—does this sound contradictory to you too?

[…] The study, called “Cultures of the Tea Party,” also claims voters who felt favorably toward the tea party movement valued deference to authority and libertarianism, writes Christina Silva of the Associated Press in a chron.com story titled Researcher says tea party voters fear change

Silva continues:

The report concludes that the tea party movement is not a new political phenomenon, but rather “is best understood as a new cultural expression of the late-20th-century Republican Party” […]

Libertarian-authoritarian change-fearing anarchists?

Why, yes, that makes perfect sense. This is one of those “studies” that reveals more about the researcher than about the object of the researcher’s inquiry.

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