Could the Republicans choose worse names for their leading presidential candidates? Anyway, looks like the doughboy is still in the race according to this report from The Official Republican Party News Channel Fox News:

Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Republican primary, Fox News projects, further scrambling an already volatile presidential race which has produced three different winners in three states as the candidates head next to Florida.

Fox News projects that Mitt Romney will place second in the Palmetto State, where he was leading in the polls just one week ago. With 5 percent of precincts reporting, Gingrich has 38 percent and Romney has 32 percent. Rick Santorum will finish in third place, Fox News projects, while Ron Paul will finish last …

Read more: Fox News

CBS reports the results of the Suffolk University Poll for the NH Primary. Ron Paul came in second, as evidenced by this graphic.

I don’t like Ron Paul, but you can’t help but shudder when you see this happening. Journalists remind us they need and deserve unfettered access in order to give the public the truth, but evidently they need the access to decide what should be true.

The excuse for this omission is that Ron Paul is not a viable candidate despite his early popularity, and that’s a fair guess; but it’s a lie. Huntsman, Palin, and Bachmann never stood a chance, and yet they were given plenty of coverage. Why do I still know the name Dick Gephardt?

Abby and Robbie Martin discuss the Iowa Caucus: the GOP candidates, the corporate media’s coverage of the events, cherrypicking racist attributes among the contenders, the phasing out of Ron Paul as a “front runner”; election fraud: the fact that there is voting software designed to flip the vote; NDAA: an update of how the legislation was passed and breakdown of what it actually means for citizens living in the US.

The presidential election is just one big job interview, so it makes sense that as long as we’re talking about hiring, we should talk about firing. Mitt Romney recently said: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.” Horrifying, right? How on earth could any human being like firing anyone? Well, to be fair, he didn’t say he liked firing anyone. He said he liked being able to fire someone. And so do you. You do it all the time.

Read More: CBS News

The highest overall rating went to former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican-turned-Libertarian, who opposes the Patriot Act and — unlike Obama — supports the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Among the leading Republican candidates, libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul also got a higher score than Obama despite low ratings in several categories.

The ACLU gave the Texas congressman high marks for opposing the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, condemning waterboarding and voting to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But it criticized Paul’s call for an end to “birthright citizenship” for children of illegal immigrants, his support of the law that denies federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples and his opposition to abortion.

Obama, endorsed by abortion-rights groups in 2008, was given three torches on “reproductive choice” by the ACLU, which cited his support for federal funding of Planned Parenthood and family-planning programs but also his bowing to Republican demands to ban funding for poor women’s abortions in Washington, D.C., as part of legislation to prevent a government shutdown.

Read More: San Fransisco Chronicle

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the surging candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been simultaneously lauded for his devotion to technological innovation, and ridiculed for his warnings about futuristic weapons.

Gingrich, who has dabbled in science fiction and cited both futurist Alvin Toffler and the concept of “psychohistory” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels as intellectual inspirations, has long been dubbed “Newt Skywalker” thanks to his vision of future warfare that blends fact and fantasy. This streak of futurism is, by his own admission, rooted in a political and philosophical belief about technology and power. ”I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats for security,” Gingrich told Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in 1994, in reference to his support for missile defense.

Not all his futurism is a bad thing. Many of Gingrich’s early ideas, such as encouraging the Pentagon to fund bureaucratically stripped-down “Skunk Works“–type innovation are laudable.

Read More: Sharon Weinberger in Foreign Policy

Show your support – sign the petition. Thanks Miles Jaffe for sending us the link.

In the 1969 film Putney Swope, members of the board of executives were prohibited from voting for themselves, so they all voted for the one board member they were sure nobody else would vote for. Ergo, this free, democratic election produced a chairman that no voter wanted.

In a perfect democracy, everyone gets an equal opportunity to vote, and equal representation. Therefore, we hold elections to let everyone have their say, to either vote representatives into office, or to enact certain laws. It’s a fine idea, and most countries do their level best to implement such systems. Some voters take advantage of it, and some choose apathy and don’t vote. Some try to anticipate what other voters might do, and cast a vote in an unexpected direction not to vote for a candidate, but to affect another candidate’s chances. This is what went wrong in Putney Swope: each voter cast a throwaway vote hoping to improve his own chances. In most elections, everyone has the right to do any of these things; the election is theirs, and theirs to decide. But what many of them might not know is that virtually any electoral process is flawed. Some outcomes are surprising. There are a number of different circumstances in which the candidate most desired does not win.

Democratic voting is only simple if there are just two candidates, or if it’s a Yes or No vote. In those cases, any attempt to vote tactically or to create a voting block — casting votes that don’t represent your preference — work against you. What we’re talking about today are elections where there are three or more candidates. And the idea that all the various systems for running such elections are flawed (subject to results that do not represent the group’s preference) is not just a whim or a crazy opinion of mine. It’s proven by Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, named for the economist Kenneth Arrow, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize in economics and the 2004 National Medal of Science. He proved it in 1951 with his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University.

Arrow’s theorem can be simplified into one clear statement: that no fair voting system exists when there are three or more candidates. To this I ask: What do you mean by fair? That’s the key to Arrow’s theorem. It holds true, depending on a rigid definition of fair that must satisfy three criteria:

1. If every individual prefers X to Y, then the group prefers X to Y.

2. If every voter’s preference of X over Y stays the same, then the group’s preference of X to Y stays the same, even if other preferences change: such as Y to Z, or Z to X.

3. There can be no dictator, as Arrow called him; a single voter with the power to dictate the group’s preference.

Arrow’s theorem applies to election systems that require voters to rank the candidates. This is the case with most voting systems worldwide. Typically, when you vote, you mark an X in the box for one candidate. That’s a ranking; you’ve ranked that candidate first. Arrow’s theorem applies to these simple ranking systems, but its richest mathematical complexities come from systems with three or more candidates and the voters rank all candidates in order of preference. This isn’t used in many real-world elections, but it’s the theoretical basis for social choice theory.

[Read the rest at Skeptoid.com]

JACKSON, Miss.— Mississippi voters Tuesday defeated a ballot initiative that would have declared life begins at fertilization, a proposal that supporters sought in the Bible Belt state as a way to prompt a legal challenge to abortion rights nationwide.

The so-called “personhood” initiative was rejected by more than 55 percent of voters, falling far short of the threshold needed for it to be enacted. If it had passed, it was virtually assured of drawing legal challenges because it conflicts with the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a legal right to abortion. Supporters of the initiative wanted to provoke a lawsuit to challenge the landmark ruling.

The measure divided the medical and religious communities and caused some of the most ardent abortion opponents, including Republican Gov. Haley Barbour, to waver with their support.

Read More: AP via Boston Globe

Nearly lost in the troves of campaign finance data recently released by presidential candidates was an updated list of bundlers for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. These 359 well-connected supporters have raised at least $56 million for Obama and the Democratic National Committee so far this year, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama’s campaign, the sole presidential campaign to disclose information about its bundlers, only gives broad ranges for the amounts these elite fund-raisers have raised, so the exact amount they’ve raised is unknown.

But because the campaign releases a figure for the minimum amount bundled, it’s safe to say that bundlers constitute a sizable portion of the fund-raising for Obama and the DNC.

In fact, more than $1 of every $3 donated to Obama and the DNC so far this year has come from bundlers, according to the Center’s research. Through Sept. 30, the date of the most recent campaign finance filings, the Obama campaign has raised about $90 million and the DNC has raised about $64 million.

For the longest time I didn’t get Occupy Wall Street, but then Herman Cain helped me out: He said something so monumentally wrong that my reaction against it pointed me in the right direction.

Here’s Herman: Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! … It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.

That’s when I got it. An unjust system’s first line of defense is shame. As long as we’re ashamed to admit that we’re victims, as long as we’re ashamed to identify with the other losers, we’re helpless.

It would be great to have a 10-point plan that solves everything. It would be great to have a party that endorses that plan and a get-out-the-vote movement to put that party into office. But none of that is going to happen until large numbers of us cast off our shame, until we turn the shame around: We need to stop being ashamed that we couldn’t crack the top 1%, and instead cast shame on an economic system that only works for 1%. The people who defend that immoral system and profit from it — they should be ashamed, not us.

That’s what Occupy Wall Street is about. OWS isn’t about plans and parties and votes. That all comes later. OWS is about casting off shame and learning to identify with the other losers …

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