Month: March 2012

A YouTube baby:

Since people tend to surf the web more when they're tired, today is especially unproductive:

The investigators [led by David Wagner] recognised an event that affects everyone’s sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust. … [Wagner's team] found that Entertainment-related searches on the Monday after DST were 3.1% more prevalent than the previous Monday, and 6.4% than the subsequent Monday.

He has made over $20 billion since his recent financial nadir, making him the most successful comeback artist in the Great Recession. Forbes' profile is well worth reading, if only to prep for what the Greater Israel fanatic, whose sons, according to Forbes, carry Israeli passports, will do to finance the removal of Obama from office. He claims that his goal in US politics is to ensure that socialism is kept at bay:

“What scares me is the continuation of the socialist-style economy we’ve been experiencing for almost four years. That scares me because the redistribution of wealth is the path to more socialism, and to more of the government controlling people’s lives. What scares me is the lack of accountability that people would prefer to experience, just let the government take care of everything and I’ll go fish or I won’t work, etc.”

His own career – working from the bootstraps up to become a casino billionaire – is certainly impressive, as the profile shows, and as this classic Connie Bruck piece also details. And if Obama really is a socialist, then presumably Adelson be willing to throw as much money as he can to tear the president down. He says in the interview that he could spend $100 million to back a candidate – or more, if necessary. A billion would be no problem – and after Citizens United, he could flood the country with anti-Obama Super PAC ads. But he has his limits:

With Gingrich looking increasingly unviable, does that mean he’ll throw his largess behind another candidate? “If Ron Paul is chosen I certainly wouldn’t do that.” What about front-runner Mitt Romney? “I don’t want to say. Newspapers said I had two meetings with Romney and Gingrich [on Feb. 3], which is untrue. Most of what is being said about me in this current brouhaha is just not true. I know Romney; I like him. I know Santorum; I like him. … The likelihood is that I’m going to be supportive of whoever the candidate is. I just haven’t decided that yet and will wait to see what happens.”

If your core issue is alleged socialism, why remove Ron Paul from consideration? The answer is, of course, Paul opposes a pre-emptive war against Iran. There will be more money spent in this campaign to foment a new war in the Middle East than we have ever witnessed. When you combine Citizens United and the Greater Israel Lobby, you have one hell of a propaganda machine.

Explained:

"We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed," said cognitive scientist Kyle Jasmin of the University of College London, co-author of a study about the so-called "QWERTY effect" in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. "As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard." The effect may arise from the fact that letter combinations that fall on the right side of the keyboard tend to be easier to type than those on the left. "If it’s easy, it tends to lend a positive meaning. If it’s harder, it can go the other way," Jasmin said.

Mark Liberman isn't buying it.

Buzzfeed has obtained a memo outlining Santorum's new long game, which essentially depends on a brokered convention. Zeke Miller explains the strategy as "winning-by-losing": 

The memo, to be distributed today, indicates that the Santorum campaign seems more concerned with arguing that Romney will not win a majority of delegates to the Republican National Convention, rather than making the case for why he will. Indeed, the over-2,000-word memo only addresses the possibility of Santorum reaching a majority in its final paragraph, and only as a throw-away. Central to Santorum's strategy are county and state conventions, which select delegates to the convention in caucus states. Santorum's campaign asserts that they will outperform their caucus-night delegate shares because convention-goers are by-and-large more conservative than the average Republican voter.

Michael Brendan Dougherty pokes holes: 

1) Ron Paul is already pursuing something like it, counting on state conventions and other internal GOP events to grant him more delegates than his share of the popular vote allows. And Paul's campaign is more organized than Santorum and has been pushing this strategy for months longer. 2) It assumes that political forces, like the rest of the Republican party, will just allow Santorum to destroy the presumptive nominee on the tiniest hope that after breaking the Republican convention into pieces Santorum can reassemble it himself. 3) It also assumes that Santorum is going to continue scoring embarrassing victories against Romney. But polls show Romney is already starting to close the gap in Alabama and Mississippi. 

Jim Antle is more optimistic: 

There are a lot of conservative primary voters out there who are least open to a contested convention and would like to deny Romney the nomination by any means necessary. They would regard as a strategy to deny Romney a majority as a victory of sorts, and might look favorably on any candidate with a plan to do so.

Ed Morrissey has more. 

The Obama campaign has released a powerful series of ads touting healthcare reform:

Another ad personalizes a different facet of the law:

Other ACA ads here, here and here. Relatedly, the DNC spotlights the conservative case for Obamacare:

Update: It's worth noting that the WaPo gave the above ad four Pinnochios. Meanwhile, Mitt is still deploying Trump in robocalls across the country. In this spot, Gingrich hits Santorum with his own words:

Santorum's own lengthy case:

First Read ranks the most-aired TV ads of the cycle. 

Previous Ad War Updates: Mar 8, Mar 7, Mar 6, Mar 5, Mar 2, Mar 1, Feb 29, Feb 28, Feb 27, Feb 23, Feb 22, Feb 21, Feb 17, Feb 16, Feb 15, Feb 14, Feb 13, Feb 9, Feb 8, Feb 7, Feb 6, Feb 3, Feb 2, Feb 1, Jan 30, Jan 29, Jan 27, Jan 26, Jan 25, Jan 24, Jan 22, Jan 20, Jan 19, Jan 18, Jan 17, Jan 16 and Jan 12.

Heh.

The time change doesn't reduce energy use:

Here’s a raft of studies on the subject. Most of them find that while households do use less lighting during daylight saving, thanks to the longer, brighter afternoons, they also end up cranking up the air conditioning more, which makes it either a wash or a net loser for energy use. A 2008 paper (pdf) by economists Matthew Kotchen and Laura Grant examined what happened in Indiana when, thanks to a change in state law, all counties suddenly had to shift to daylight saving. They concluded that daylight saving probably costs Indiana about $10.7 million to $14.5 million per year in higher electricity bills and increased coal pollution.

Aarhus, Denmark, 2.43 pm