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Results: CNN (AZ, MI) | Google (AZ, MI)

Polls closed.
MI Update 9:00 PM CDT: Santorum 36% Romney 40% Paul 11% Gingrich 7% .. w/57% of vote in Romney is up by 20,000 votes. Santorum looks to be heading for a loss, already moving into spin mode saying “We made Romney compete in his home state.”
AZ Update 8:10 PM CDT: Called for Romney

Update 8:25PM CDT: In Michigan, exit polls of those who said religion mattered a “great deal,” voters chose Santorum over Romney by 40 points, about 60 to 20 or so. For those who said the economy mattered most, voters went for the guy who wanted to shutter their state by more than 15 points, about 49 for Romney to Santorum’s 32 or so, via MSNBC. [Read more…]

Let’s all go to the lobby! Duel in Michigan between Mittens and Santorum


Mittens was for meddling in other party’s primaries before he was against it

Update: moments ago a Romney spokesman had an incoherent explanation for why Romney wasn’t being hypocritical in that video clip:

That was a totally different situation, that was when Mitt was a private sector businessman, before he started his political career. He was an unenrolled voter, and that meant he could go into either party primary […] He never in any of the races where he was a candidate ever encouraged Democrats to go into a Republican primary and create mischief and that’s what Rick Santorum is doing.

There was a time when the Romney name in Michigan was akin to the Kennedy name in Massachusetts, well received, liked, even across otherwise contentious party lines. But that was before Mittens volunteered a big op-ed saying Detroit should go bankrupt [Read more…]

Wikileaks published sensitive data allegedly from Stratfor

Austin based Strategic Forecasting, more commonly known as Statfor and compared at times to a private, shadowey CIA, has had a trove of emails stolen and published on Wikileaks by the hacker coalition known as anonymous. One rumor going around about the stolen data is it was not encrypted. If that turns out to be the case, it could spell real financial trouble for an agency that depends on secrecy and security. Fox News link below, with my apologies: [Read more…]

The truth about cats and dogs

I see a little brouhaha has formed here among the godless over cats vs dogs. It’s an issue that does elicit surprisingly strong feelings among pet owners. Of course, no one can settle the question of which is better, that’s a subjective call. But we can look at why dog and cats behave so differently. We just need to start at the beginning, with a little evolution and a dash of natural history! [Read more…]

Master of my own domain

I have a friend who enjoys working in the medium of wood. I can understand, there’s something about working with wood that seems to offer a Zen experience. Over the years he’s become quite good at it, in fact I would say at this point he’s an artist of sorts. Anyway, he’s making me a beautifully finished coffee table, shown above during construction, and when I looked underneath what signature did I see set skillfully into the Kos-orange, hand-crafted lacquer finish? [Read more…]

The Milky Way could be full of nomads

Artist's conception of a Jupiter-size rogue planet with the edge on disk of a spiral galaxy in the background. Image via the Wiki

In ancient times planets were easily distinguished from stars because they’d wander from one constellation to another. It was that feature that eventually led Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler to record exact positions — without the aide of telescopic lenses — giving birth to modern planetary astronomy. Now a new class of wandering planets has been proposed, and Kepler’s NASA namesake might play a role in learning about these mysterious objects too. Call them Nomads: [Read more…]

The endlessly evolving position of conservatives on stolen documents

There it is, first stolen documents were bad and the perps should be punished. But a year later when stolen emails were posted in misleading snippets to falsely portray an international conspiracy among climate researchers the conservative disinformation machine, including the Heartland Institute, was giddy with excitement. Now some docs reportedly indicating the lengths to which that same org will go have been published and they have suddenly rediscovered their moral compass and are back on the fainting couch. [Read more…]