Newt Gingrich won the Republican primary in South Carolina by 12 percentage points. Mitt Romney was also stripped of his Iowa win after a recount. With a possible new front runner (Gingrich looks to be leading polls in Florida as well) who does not have the support of the party elite now competing against Romney, who also lacks backing - is a late entry candidate a possible scenario?
Romney really is a wildly successful businessman with a traditional family life. And Gingrich is indeed a right-wing culture warrior. In attacking one another, maximum damage is done by focusing on specific heresies against ideology, so that it becomes harder and harder for a voter to support either man and still think of himself as a principled conservative. For example, the individual mandate is now widely denounced on the right as unconservative, and hearing that Romney and Gingrich supported it is enough to cost them some votes.
Also:
And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.
Peter W. Singer, The New York Times Sunday Review: Do Drones Undermine Democracy?, January 21, 2012Eight experts rate President Obama's foreign policy.
The Atlantic on the rise of antibiotic resistance
On the one hand, there's the super-creepy ACTA (Remember when it looked like we'd all soon be travelling with the good old Walkman instead of digital music players? That might still be happening) looming in the distance, on the other, the European Commission is proposing a data protection regulation that would give consumers control over how their personal data is being used.
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