Election Update, 3-13-12

The big story of the night is that Rick Santorum won primaries in both Alabama and Mississippi despite trailing in polls in both states.  More accurate than the polls were predictions based on demography -- the results continued to be starkly different by geographic region.

The obvious questions regarding tonight's results are: 1.) Will Gingrich drop out now?; and 2.) Does Santorum actually have a chance against Romney?

It's too early for a definitive answer to either, but both look far more likely than they did just a few hours ago.  Romney has huge delegate, organizational, and financial advantages, but no longer looks that much more electable than Romney.  In hypothetical head-to-head match-ups with Obama, Santorum loses by an average of 6 points while Romney loses by an average of 3.

Exit polls in both states indicated that voters who wanted the most conservative candidate tended to vote for Santorum while those who wanted the most electable candidate tended to vote for Romney (50 and 52% of the voters in Mississippi and Alabama said that Romney's positions were "not conservative enough" while 49 and 46% said Romney was most likely to defeat Obama).

The split over electability versus conservativeness may partially explain why former first lady Barbara Bush recently said that this is "the worst campaign I've ever seen in my life . . . I hate the fact that people think 'compromise' is a dirty word".

Meanwhile, President Obama may be more vulnerable in November than many thought just a few weeks ago.  The latest tracking polls reveal a drop in his approval ratings, with the NYT/CBS polls reporting just a 41% approval rate.  The same poll has Obama up only 4 points in a hypothetical match-up with Santorum.

And it could always get worse, particularly if oil prices continue to rise.  The Economist writes that "More expensive oil is, for now, doing little harm to global growth" but "if the Strait of Hormuz is threatened, the resulting surge in oil prices will spell the end of the global recovery".

Health Links, 3-12-12

The Tennessean is currently soliciting readers' ideas on how to combat childhood obesity.

School lunches have been the subject of recent intense fights between health advocates on one side and industry lobbyists and politicians from states that grow and produce less healthy foods on the other.

Despite recent controversy, it's still allowed in school lunches, and 70% of ground beef in the US contains what the meat industry refers to as "lean, finely textured beef" and what critics refer to as "pink slime," which is made mostly from connective tissue and has ammonia added to kill bacteria.

Here's a feature from the Tennessean about attempts to limit sugar intake.  Here are some corresponding public service announcements about sugary beverages.

Here's a long, but interesting, article about genetics and other factors that explain why weight gained can't be reduced to a simple equation computing calories consumed and calories burned.

Here's an explanation of how exercise benefits the brain

New technology may help people manage their weight, including new watch-like devices designed to track physical activity and food consumption

There are signs that obesity rates may finally be beginning to level off

A wide array of businesses are taking steps to help people eat healthier.  Wal-Mart has announced a new food labeling system.  And the Quaker Oats man is now skinnier.

Here's an update on Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign

Food writer Mark Bittman says people need to understand that potatoes are healthy but Pringles aren't

The average American ate literally a ton of food this past year

Life expectancy in the US has fallen significantly further behind international averages since 2000

Family Teaching Kitchens are currently being run by the United Way in Tennessee to help people learn how to cook healthier for their family.

Politics Links, 3-11-12

Romney won enough states on Super Tuesday to cement his position as frontrunner and extend his delegate lead, but not enough to convince Gingrich, Paul, or Santorum to leave the race.  As a result, Romney's staff began responding to those who question his lack of decisive victories by arguing that the delegate math makes it impossible for any of the other candidates to win.

Santorum, meanwhile, won a decisive victory in Kansas on Saturday, extending his streak of winning every state in the middle of the country.

Meanwhile, turnout is down in the majority of Republican primaries to date -- with the exception of states with "open" primaries that allow Independents and Democrats to vote.

The economy added 227,000 jobs in February -- the third consecutive month with 200K+ jobs added -- and a wide range of figures indicate likely future growth


Harvard Economist (and Romney campaign consultant) Greg Mankiw provides a breakdown of what counts as ordinary earned income and what counts as capital gains using five examples where people make money off the sale of a house.

In a rare act of bipartisanship, the House passed the JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) by a vote of 390-23.  The bill is designed to make it easier for new businesses to obtain financing.

Female legislators in Georgia's State Senate walked out last week to protest votes on limiting access to contraception and abortions -- what they called "a war on women"

Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican Senator from Maine, has decided not to run again because she sees little possibility of progress given the partisan gridlock

Illegal border crossings along the Mexican border have decreased by about 2/3 over the past six years, but there's been an uptick in violent confrontations

Environmental Links, 3-11-12

The Outer Banks faces a large question regarding their highway that keeps getting destroyed as weather eats away at the sand supporting it and sea levels potentially rise . . . locals suffer economically every time another section is destroyed and not immediately repaired, but the state suffers financially every time they temporarily fix the road.

The BBC explores how the Fukushima nuclear disaster affected worldwide views of nuclear power . . . meanwhile, Japan has shut down all but two of their 54 nuclear reactors.  In the US, expansion of nuclear power plants depends, in part, on finding a place to permanently store waste.  TN Senator Lamar Alexander thinks that if we offer high enough incentives, communities will step forward to volunteer to host such storage facilities.

Ohio has stiffened laws on "fracking" after concluding that recent drilling caused earthquakes around Youngstown . . . fracking and related earthquakes were also mentioned in a Dilbert cartoon last week.

Both environmental leaders and deficit hawks are fighting against an increase in natural gas powered vehicles.

Deliverymen in NYC are increasingly using electric bikes, despite the upping of the fine to $1,000 for their use

Here's an op-ed arguing for increased use of methanol to power cars.  And The Economist also has a feature on methanol.


According to a new poll, Californians narrowly support high-speed rail . . . but those planning on voting do not

Environmental Policy Links, 2-28-12

Envia Systems, in the Silicon Valley, has developed an electric vehicle battery that would allow a car to travel 300 miles between chargings

Paul Krugman on solar vs. fracking

The BBC reports that fish stocks are being severely depleted in many places and explores some potential policy solutions

Scientists are being hampered in their study of global warming

The Economist argues climate change will be single most important thing, retrospectively, in 100 years

Due to decreased demand for gasoline and excess refinery capacity, the US is actually now a net exporter of gasoline

Here's the West End Bus Rapid Transit Plan and and an update on its implementation 

They're installing the "green roof" on Nashville's new convention center 

The Economist writes about the dangers of being tangled up in green-tape

Here's the lowdown on some leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, which funds scientists who seek to discredit global warming

Links, 2-22-12

Rich Santorum garnered some attention after calling the idea of schools run by state or federal governments "anachronistic"

For the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House, he said. “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.” “Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

The Economist has a feature article on Cass Sunstein's efforts to streamline federal government regulations.

NJ Governor Chris Christie says Warren Buffet "should just write a check and shut up" if he thinks that the wealthy should pay higher taxes

Ruth Ann Dailey has "a civil solution to the same-sex marriage angst".  She writes that the problem with many gay marriage laws is that they result in "religious oppression" and make religious conservatives "second-class citizens".  She cites the case of DC which passed a gay marriage law requiring that "'every third party' recognize same-sex marriage as legitimate".  The result, she says, is that Catholic Charities ended it's foster care rather than allow gay couples to adopt babies and discontinued health insurance rather than provide coverage to gay spouses.  Her solution is for the government to offer only civil unions to all citizens, straight or gay, and for churches to choose which unions they recognize as marriage or not.  She says the approach has worked in California, where the San Francisco diocese now simply offers health insurance coverage to a "second adult" in the household "regardless of relationship".

Rick Santorum has polled ahead of Mitt Romney in the last six national polls, including leads of 10+ points in three of them.

Thomas Friedman writes that a third-party candidate is likely if the Republicans nominate Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney spent far more money than he took in during the month of January, erasing his large lead in fundraising.

Frank Bruni writes that people are too focused on drugs when they discuss the deaths of Whitney Houston and Amy Whinehouse.  He says that alcohol does far more societal damage than do drugs but that nobody seems willing to confront the problem -- excise taxes have markedly declined over the past few decades in real dollars, for example.  Therefore, he argues, we need to level a pigovian tax on alcohol to account for these negative externalities.

President Obama wants to cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% but eliminate enough loopholes, exceptions, and subsidies to make the tax cut revenue neutral.

The economy looks like it's recovering, but there's always the danger that gas prices, local/state government funding cuts, turmoil in Europe, or some unforeseen shock (e.g. the Nuclear disaster in Japan last year) could derail growth.

Links, 2-20-12

3 of the 4 candidates have declined to participate in March 1st debate CNN is sponsoring in Atlanta, which means that the debate next Wednesday in Arizona could be the last debate of the primary season

Here's an interesting piece on various attempts to quantify the conservative-ness of the Republican candidates.  Santorum is rated more moderately on economic issues and more conservatively on social issues than Romney.  Correspondingly, newspapers mention social issues in conjunction with Santorum's name far more often than they do with Romney's name (and vice-versa with economic issues).  The keywords most frequently used in conjunction with Santorum's name are sex/sexuality, gay rights/gay marriage/same-sex marriage, and birth control/contraception.  Meanwhile, tax/taxes, stimulus, and wealth/wealthy/rich are most frequently used in articles discussing Romney.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat follows the trend by pointing out that Santorum thinks contraception should be legal but that both he and liberals agree that abortions should be minimized, writing that "both Democrats and Republicans generally agree that the country would be better off with fewer pregnant teenagers, fewer unwanted children, fewer absent fathers, fewer out-of-wedlock births"

Where cultural liberals and social conservatives differ is on the means that will achieve these ends. The liberal vision tends to emphasize access to contraception as the surest path to stable families, wanted children and low abortion rates. The more direct control that women have over when and whether sex makes babies, liberals argue, the less likely they’ll be to get pregnant at the wrong time and with the wrong partner — and the less likely they’ll be to even consider having an abortion. (Slate’s Will Saletan has memorably termed this “the pro-life case for Planned Parenthood.”)
The conservative narrative, by contrast, argues that it’s more important to promote chastity, monogamy and fidelity than to worry about whether there’s a prophylactic in every bedroom drawer or bathroom cabinet. To the extent that contraceptive use has a significant role in the conservative vision (and obviously there’s some Catholic-Protestant disagreement), it’s in the context of already stable, already committed relationships. Monogamy, not chemicals or latex, is the main line of defense against unwanted pregnancies. 

He continues to argue that the problem with the Conservative vision is that "a successful chastity-centric culture seems to depned on a level of social cohesion, religious intensity shared values that exists only in small pockets of the country" and that the problem with the Liberal vision is that "more condoms, fewer abortions" is not playing out in reality -- that more liberal states sometimes have lower teen birth rates only because they have higher rates of abortion among teens.

The Economist asks how much of the declining crime rate is due to the growing prison population

A new study finds that people grow more tolerant as they grow older

Paul Krugman takes Mitt Romney to task for calling himself "severely conservative," writing that "severely" is usually used to describe a disease (a linguistics prof. at Penn says "severely" is most frequently coupled with disabled, depressed, ill, limited, and injured) and asks if Romney and others have "Severe Conservative Syndrome".

today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

Congress will pay for the extension in the payroll tax by auctioning off public airwaves currently used for TV broadcasts to wireless carriers

Here's a chart comparing organ donation rates around the world

This is only sort of related to public policy, but interesting nonetheless -- here are two charts breaking down what men and women want in a partner and how that's changed in the past 70 years.

The majority of babies born to women under 30 are now born out of wedlock, though the stats differ greatly by race and SES: "About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less"

And to round out the trio of articles on marriage and child-rearing here's a piece on how to develop self-control in your child in which the authors say recent books extolling the virtues of Chinese and French-style parenting aren't the only way.

Effective approaches for building self-control combine fun with progressively increasing challenges. Rather than force activities onto an unwilling child, take advantage of his or her individual tendencies. When children develop self-control through their own pursuit of happiness, no parental hovering is required. Find something that the child is crazy about but that requires active effort. Whether it’s compiling baseball statistics or making (but not passively watching) YouTube videos, passionate hobbies build mental staying power that can also be used for math homework.