Surprisingly fresh-faced and prideful Jim Messina, the Obama re-elect manager in Chicago, leads the faithful through the Electoral College scenarios for the November 2012 election.   In 2008, POTUS achieved 365 Electoral College votes.  The thinking in Chicago is that they can give up a lot of territory and win the bare minimum 270 plus a handful.  The West scenario, winning CO, NM, NV and IA, is surprising to me, as it gives up OH, NC and VA.  The Florida scenario gives up everything including OH.  The New South scenario wins VA and NC while giving up OH and the West.  Oddest of all is the Midwest scenario, where they win with just OH and IA.  The planning is routinely defeatist, defensive, cautious -- more resembling a worst-elect briefing.   Also, note that PA and NH are in the Obama re-elect camp in each scenario except the so-called "expansion path," which puts PA and NH in the Red and presumes VA and AZ along with IA, NM, CO, and NV.  Strange brew, like some idle game on an iPhone hanging around O'Hare.  What I focus on is how they take PA and NH for granted.  The Electoral College is so tight, the loss of NH wrecks that re-elect game.  Odd that Messina doesn't focus on NH?  At 4 EC votes, it would seem available to POTUS, with heavy Boston TV exposure and a sympathetic, college-educated urban electorate; but no special mention.  With Mitt Romney the primary candidate that the Obama team most expects in the general, with his home in toney, splendid Wolfeboro, NH (below, the oldest summer resort on Lake Winnipesaukee), the autumn campaigning will be in a headwind for POTUS.  Why no Wolfeboro worrying in Chicago?

  

Speaking Bob Zimmerman re the year past in climate science, where we exchange our thoughts that we know surprisingly little about the climate change dynamic. Our main sequence G-type star is likely critical to the climate; however, we do not know how, or how much, the sunspots and the solar wind affect out climate cycles. There is a theory that the supervolcano Toba in what is now Sumatra Island, Indonesia (below: remains of the crater, now a vast lake), and the following nuclear winter lasted perhaps a thousand years of ecological defeat, reducing Homo Sapiens worldwide population to under 100,000, perhaps as low as 3,000 Homo Sapiens and 3,000 Neanderthals. This is a deep irony, that we are just 70,000 years from the near end, and only 60,000 years from the theory that the Homo Sapiens remnant, boosted in intellectual property by language, emerged from out of Africa. We are fragile, fleeting, accidental, unprotected from the violent whims of planetary physics. Watching the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes later on iTunes, and how much fun it is to consider that our political culture springs from the family unit and is only as nimble as the family unit. What I enjoy about the Silverback ape scenes above from Uganda is the family of the gigantic, self-confident family man; the much smaller, secure, watchful females, and the curious, secure infants. Our instincts to survive and prosper derive from this drama, and the vagaries of climate are not an unanswerable threat. The nuclear winter would have damaged the numbers, but not the concept of the unit, just as our climate change, perhaps a warming, perhaps drought, will not change the fundamental unit.

The Central Committee in Beijing climbs down from its confrontation with the modest village of Wukan by making what are called "concessions" to the villagers to release hostages and investigate the suspect murder of a village leader.  The big picture (my favorite pet metaphor of the Second World War) is that the Central Committee is weakening perceptibly as the Chinese people advance their understanding of transparency, fair play, the rule of law and the advantage of elected official held accountable at the ballot box for grotesque stupidity and other routine careerist potholes.  Tibet, the Uyghurs, the Christians, Taiwan, the Mongolians, all these subsets of Imperial China are predicates for the Wukan rising, as the Wukan advantage so far will encourage the defiance of the conquered regions to reject the Central Committee and the sectarian bullying of the Party and the Han majority.  All positive steps.  There is the 20% chance that the Central Committee is lying cynically, and the Wukan dissenters will be punished gradually.  The village, county and province Party bosses who concocted the land grab and fishing rights larceny may be punished, or may buy off their masters and move on to other crony games.   For now, Wukan is an inspiration for all the villagers who see the facts on the ground that the Maoists in Beijing and their toadies in the provinces have no legitimacy nor do they derive genuine authority from their so-called peasant roots.  Most enjoy the snapshot below of what is described as the Wukan News Desk.  Those teenagers are the future of free and democratic China.  Speaking Gordon Chang, Naomi Revnick, Bruce Bechtol, Isaac Stone Fish, Joseph Sternberg, John Lee of Sydney University, re the Central Committee fail with regard the economy, Wukan, DPRK and the Kim cult, Taiwan elections on January 12, 2012, and Tibet. 

Below from Jason Strother of BBC/PRI re the heavyweight opera voice of TV star Ri Chun Hee in the classic video reporting the death of the Devil, Kim.  My favorite is the backdrop of pine forests and mountains.  DPRK is a failed, rogue state of Devils and the doomed.  Unacceptable conduct since at least 1950, making war on its own people and anyone in the neighborhood.  Ike traveled stealthily to Korea in December 1952 to meet the same intransigence we see today.  The Kim cult is sadistic, homicidal, paranoid, repetitive and now nuke-armed.  Beijing has used the Kim cult for at least thirty years to distribute missile and nuke proliferation guidance to other failed, rogue states of Devils.  One-Party states are always on fire, and any pact with a One-Party state is a joint suicide deal.  No solving DPRK and the Kim cult (now unto the third generation of sadists) until there is a solution to the One-Party sadistic state of Beijing's Central Committee.  Bad lunch hours in CPville these days, with Wukan defiant, Kim inorganic, manufacturing shrinking, and the loan portfolio of the city state bonds nearly as credit worthy as Madoff -- and now the absurd Kim Jung Un on the Boss Devil throne.

Most cool about the Meteor Counter now available from NASA as an IPhone/IPad/ITouch app is that the planet is turned into a beehive of skywatching voyagers who are collectively monitoring our swim through the shower of rubble that describes our Solar System.  Someday in the future, many times in the future, we sturdy skywatchers will be alert to the incoming of an asteroid such as the 1908 strike on the Siberian forest on the Tunguska River.  That meteoroid -- perhaps 50 meters in breadth --  created a fireball that generated an energy pulse or shock wave that was many times the explosive power of Hiroshima and flattened 80 million trees.

It is estimated the asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere traveling at a speed of about 33,500 miles per hour. During its quick plunge, the 220-million-pound space rock heated the air surrounding it to 44,500 degrees Fahrenheit. At 7:17 a.m. (local Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs. 

An inevitable similar event over a city like Pyongyang or Paris would crush superstructures.  Now we have an app to record the moment, and all the tiny moments building to a catastrophe.  Bolides dead ahead!

Tunguska RIver, Siberia, ground zero 2008.

 

Obvious Republican chortling, small-bore target-shooting, cheerful talking point for holiday chat, and also pointing toward the numbers coming in 2012 that are most unpromising for the POTUS re-elect.  Ho! Ho!  Estimates continue that the GDP will average 1.5% for 2012. Grim tidings for POTUS, who must change the subject each time he is in public. The election is always best when KISS, keep it simple, smiley. In this case it is JOBs, JOBs, JOBs, and these sad-sack characters add up to not quite 270 Electoral votes for POTUS. Not yet. Tell me the GDP for 2Q '12, and I will tell you where go OH, PA, VA, NC, FL - and with them, Inauguration Day '13.

It is not too late for Mitt Romney; there is time for a renovation and relaunch. It is not disastrous, what has happened to him, slipping behind the "Happy Warrior" Newt Gingrich. All this is politics as usual. What is strange is that Mitt Romney is not self-aware that he is not trusted by the GOP. How did it come to this? A man runs for president for five years, and he never gets across that he is reliable, and he never listens to the doubts. The rule in show business that I favor is that you stay where you come in. Romney is staying where he came in during his 1994 challenge to Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. In debate, Romney declared that he wasn't a Republican during the Reagan years, so he wasn't responsible for any part of the Reagan administration.  Full stop.  Seventeen years later, Romney is not a Republican.  Not much of a Democrat, either.  Romney is not even a fair politician.  Romney's social awkwardness, his intellectual caution, his calculating gaze, all suggest a banker who asks himself the same questions in and out of a room: what's in here for me, what does it take to get what I want and move on?   Is this a president?  Perhaps.  Is it a winning candidate for the GOP nomination.  Not just now.  Romney can repair himself, can rescue Mitt from Mitt; there is time and money.  But will the rescued creature be believable?  No.  And hanging out with the Bush family factotum Dan Qualye (below) is not going to move the story a bit toward credibility.  The more you see of Mitt, the more that needs rescuing of Mitt.