Links, 2-8-12

Rick Santorum went for three for three tonight, sweeping to easy victories in the Minnesota caucuses and the non-binding Missouri "primary" (the actual caucuses are a month away), and edging out Romney in the Colorado caucuses as well.  Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, finished a distant third in Colorado, an even more distant fourth in Minnesota, and failed to qualify for the ballot in Missouri.

The results will likely shock many, but not everybody.  On Monday, Ross Douthat echoed a number of other recent columns and blog posts and asked whether Santorum isn't now better positioned to challenge Romney in the Republican primaries.

Here's the graphic on nudges in lunch line design by researchers at Cornell that we discussed in class

After long resisting the idea of "Super PACs," President Obama has decided to allow staff members to make a stronger effort to raise money for the "Priorities USA" Super PAC that supports his re-election bid.

Some Republicans, including Karl Rove, attacked Chrysler's Super Bowl ad "Halftime in America" as a political ad blatantly supporting Obama's auto bailouts that cost the country billions of dollars.  Charles Blow doesn't disagree that the ad was pro-bailout, but disagrees with Rove's characterization of the bailouts, pointing out that Bush wrote the first bailout check and that Chrysler and GM have repaid almost all of the money.

Perhaps adding fuel to that fire, Joe Biden's one sentence summary of Obama's argument for re-election is "Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive".

There are now about half as many conservative "blue dog" Democrats in the House as there were a few years ago.  There are fewer moderate Republicans as well.

Here is The Economist's take on Charles Murray's new book on the classes drifting apart in America.

The Economist interviews Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner in Economics and one of the fathers of the field of Behavioral Economics and they discuss limits to the rational actor model and common mistakes in human decision making.

The Obama Administration is trying to assuage concerns from religiously-affiliated organizations, particularly the Catholic Church, after a new rule was announced requiring all organizations to offer to cover contraceptives in the health care plans they offer to outside employees

In response to the recent debates over Abortion, Andrew Rosenthal asks if abortions are truly rare in America