Month: April 2012

I’m just not sure whether to laugh uproariously at this, disdain it as racist, or appreciate it as post-racist, or, well, you decide. I confess that I burst out laughing at times. Why? I’m still not quite sure:

Jason Zengerle pulls back the curtain:

Fehrnstrom, 50, is both the wise man and the hothead. He wears the uniform of the modern political consultant—iPad tucked in the crook of his arm, open-collared shirt, rectangular-framed glasses—but his fleshy face and thick New England accent betray a rougher core. And far from reining in Romney, he performs the opposite service for his client: Fehrnstrom toughens him up. "Eric gives Mitt a capability that Mitt doesn't have," says Ben Coes, Romney's campaign manager in 2002. "It's a streetwise savvy; it's an on-the-ground Boston-smarts mentality; it's a back-alley-politics, survival-of-the-fittest point of view. Mitt is not a knife fighter. Eric is a knife fighter." The best political operatives are the ones who provide their clients with a tangible quality the candidate himself lacks. If Karl Rove was Bush's brain, then Fehrnstrom is Romney's balls. 

HuffPo's first attempt an an electoral map:

Blumenthal warns:

While this early Electoral College result will cheer Obama partisans, take it with a huge grain of salt. The polls driving the estimates for the battleground states are sparse, and all but a handful of the most recent surveys were fielded in the midst of the Republican primary contest, when the president enjoyed a bigger lead in national polling.

Sabato's map is more favorable to Romney:

Based on our analysis, Obama starts with a presumed base of 247 electoral votes, just 23 short of the magic number of 270 — but not all of them are truly secure. Romney starts with a much firmer but not ironclad 206. The election will be decided mainly in seven states with 85 toss-up votes.

Map after the jump:

Molly Ball took stock last week: 

Recently, Gingrich told a Delaware Tea Party group that he felt [Fox] had exhibited a bias against him, accusing it of "distortion"; the network fired back with a biting statement: "He's still bitter over the termination of his contributor contract." It seems safe to say that bridge, for Gingrich, has been burned. The policy and consulting enterprise Gingrich helmed is similarly on the rocks. American Solutions for Winning the Future, his major nonprofit, shut down last August, and the Gingrich Group, his for-profit advocacy shop, filed for bankruptcy in Georgia earlier this month. Together, the two entities had grossed more than $100 million over the course of a decade, according to Bloomberg. Now, thanks to Gingrich's quest for the presidency, they are defunct.

Philip Klein piles on: 

Had Gingrich's campaign actually lived up to his branding of it as being solutions oriented, it might have served some benefit, even if it came as a personal cost. But Gingrich's campaign for president was largely an embarrassment to himself and to conservatives. Early on, he attacked Rep. Paul Ryan's entitlement reforms as "right-wing social engineering" and as he became desperate to make gains against Mitt Romney, he attacked free market capitalism. Given his penchant for saying outlandish and unexpected things, I expect to see him reemerge as a media figure. But I hope my fellow conservatives don't take him seriously once he's no longer useful as a vehicle for stopping (or slowing) Romney.

(Photo: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich waves to the crowd prior to throwing out the first pitch at a baseball game between Gardner-Webb University and North Carolina A&T State University while campaigning on April 25, 2012, in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. According to reports, Gingrich told Mitt Romney that he will bow out of the race and endorse him. By John W. Adkisson/Getty Images)

Extend to the environment: 

40% of the U.S. workforce could technically work from home. Even with technological advances making this possible, only 2.5% of U.S. workers telecommute. If the 40% of workers who could telecommute would do this two days a week, it would reduce yearly carbon emissions by 53 million metric tons.

But that wouldn't solve our e-mail problem: 

[O]ne spam message produces the equivalent of 0.3 grams of CO2 … And what about the 62 trillion emails sent each year? Those emails produce as much CO2 as 1.6 million cars driving around the earth.

A reader writes:

For what it's worth, Tiny Texas Houses near Austin, Texas has been doing this for many, many years. They recycle old building materials into tiny houses.  Then they put it on a flatbed and ship it to your property. (Brad also runs the best salvage emporium I've ever seen.)

Another writes:

Tiny Houses are wonderful, especially when compared to McMansions.  However the extent to which they reduce one's carbon footprint is mitigated by the fact that they will invariably be sited in far-flung, low-density areas. 

The gas consumed by automobiles to get people to these houses will far outweigh the energy savings that could have been realized by simply choosing to live in a city near mass transit. If you must live in the country, Tiny Houses are the way to go.  But it is the residents of high-density cities that have the smallest carbon footprints.

Another points to a curious case:

Tiny houses are sometimes quite the opposite of green, as some farmers are building them to stop the construction of wind turbines. Essentially, wind turbines in Canada have to be 550 meters from residential buildings, so farmers are building small "houses" and getting permits to be recognized as such to prevent construction of turbines because they are "eye sores".

(Photo by Flickr user bunchofpants)

Tim Stelloh reports on a police questionnaire developed in Maryland that appears to have been responsible for the state's 40% drop in domestic abuse:

The first three questions concerned the most important predictors of future homicide: Has the abuser used a weapon against you? Has he threatened to kill you? Do you think he might kill you? If the woman answered yes to any of those questions, she "screened in." If she answered no, but yes to four of the remaining eight questions, again, she was in. Among these were other, less obvious indicators of fatal violence: Has he ever tried to kill himself? Does she have a child that he knows isn’t his?

The officer would then present her with an assessment: Others in your circumstances have been killed; help is available if you want it. If the woman agreed, an officer would dial the local shelter from a police cell phone (to prevent the abuser from finding out about the call) and hand it over.

A hathos-filled tumblr. Dish faves:

In all likelihood:

My previous research had indicated that large changes in the House of Representatives are quite unusual when the White House and House of Representatives are controlled by different parties. As I wrote last October, "It would seem that in the past 60 years voters have been unwilling to reward or blame either party too greatly when faced with split government. They tend to like the status quo." All the factors I look at seem to suggest that will hold. A modest Democratic gain of about 5-13 seats at this point seems the most likely scenario. 

The Chinese eat far more meat than Americans:

The Economist captions:

This year [China] is forecast to eat 71m tonnes [of meat] compared with America's 33m tonnes. On a per-person basis, however, China eats half as much: 53kg against 105kg. Meanwhile, consumption in America has fallen by 6% since 2007, though whether this is down to a health-related choice or financial necessity is not clear.