SOUTH CAROLINA: Why Romney Lost.

Plus: Gingrich wins majority among married women.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston: Three Different Contests, Three Different Winners? What then of ‘Inevitability’ and ‘Electability’?

Plus, Michael Patrick Leahy: Tea Party Slaps Down Mitt Romney.

MORE: Roger Simon: Will Newt Gingrich Grow Up — and Win?

MORE STILL: A female reader writes that Gingrich may not have been so hurt by ex-wife Marianne’s TV interview:

Hate to say this and don’t use my name, but I watched the interview and thought

“You bitch, he cheated on his first wife with you. What the heck did you expect?”

That may explain it.

STILL MORE: Another female reader writes: “Check the dates. Marianne, the supposed women scorned, married Newt when his star was rising (1981-his second term in Congress) and divorced him at his political nadir in 2000. If Callista is the real golddigger she’s also the one who stood by her man in his politically lean decade.”

BECAUSE IT’S ONLY SAFE TO PICK ON CHRISTIANS: University atheist society president forced to resign after cartoon of Muhammad having a drink with Jesus is posted on Facebook.

And the lesson to Christians (and other religions) is that if you want respect, make people physically afraid. But if that’s the incentive system you create — and it is absolutely the one that’s been created — don’t be surprised if people pick up on it. Because the lesson of this decade is that people respond to incentives, even perverse ones.

EGALITARIANISM: A Caveman Sentiment?

In an important way, though, envy is beyond good and evil. It is a link in the nexus of egalitarian feelings that originate in our DNA. Evolutionary fires forged these feelings over millions of years. For most of those years, after all, our forebears were grubbing around in the bushes trying to survive on a never-ending camping trip without marshmallows or coolers. So our brains evolved to survive not in climate-controlled shopping centers, but within kinship groups in unforgiving wilds. You needed your clan and your clan needed you.

Thus, the feelings that go along with that tribal interdependency—including envy—are “hardwired.” And we’ve not had enough time in civilization to rewire them. “Natural selection, the process that designed our brain,” write Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “takes a long time to design a circuit of any complexity. The time it takes to build circuits that are suited to a given environment is so slow it is hard to even imagine—it’s like a stone being sculpted by wind-blown sand. Even relatively simple changes can take tens of thousands of years.”

Which would mean that “progressive” sentiments are really regressive sentiments, I guess.

BOOK TITLE OF THE WEEK: Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now.

DISASTER PREPARATION: Putting together an emergency computer kit.

SO MUCH FOR THAT E-TEXTBOOK DEAL: Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement.

UPDATE: Reader David Rubenstein disagrees:

I have to disagree with your implication that Apple’s E-textbook deal is a bad deal for authors – and with the sentiment of the article you linked. That was my initial reaction when I originally learned the terms. But last night I watched the keynote product launch and changed my mind.

First, Apple is giving away the tool to create the e-textbooks. So they need to make money somewhere.

Second, watching how you can use the tool to create the textbook, it is clear that it is a tool for formatting rather than creation. (Though it can be used for both.) The text and images can (and should?) be created in other applications (such as Word, Pages, Keynote, etc.), then dragged and dropped into the new text book creating application for final formatting. Done this way, authors will not be precluded form selling the materials as dead tree text books, epub books, etc.

Based on this, why should Apple give the application away and then let you sell the final product elsewhere? Let others figure out ways to create quality e-textbooks on their own dime. But publishers should be smart enough to create their content in a way as to not tie it up with Apple – just the format. Now let Amazon and B&N create similar tools and launch an e-textbook arms race.

Just my two cents. And I reserve all rights to question the effectiveness of e-textbooks over the dead tree variety. Though I certainly would not have minded lugging fewer texts around with me back in the day.

Hmm.

ZACH BARBERA WRITES: “So, say Obama loses the election this fall. Wonder what his midnight pardons are going to look like? Scary…”

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IOWA: Not Just A Democrat Dirty Trick, But A Crime. “That Edwards allegedly tried to steal the Secretary of State’s identity in order to frame Schultz for ‘unethical behavior in office’ is no coincidence. Iowa Democrats, as Kevin Hall of the Iowa Republican points out, have mounted a campaign of false accusations against Schultz. . . . So on its face, Edwards’s identity theft appears to be part of a coordinated effort by the Iowa Democratic Party to bring down the Republican Secretary of State so he can be replaced with a Democrat. We hope that Edwards will get the long jail term that he deserves, but the more important question is, from whom was he taking instructions?”

More here.

UPDATE: Various readers are putting this scandal in the context of the Democrats’ Secretary Of State Project.

WHAT HAPPENED before the Big Bang?

CENSORSHIP: Government takedown of Megaupload leads to new fears.

THIS IS TERRIBLE: Terror Attacks In Kano, Nigeria Kill At Least 162. My brother lived in Kano back in the ’90s and it was a nice place then.

SOUTH CAROLINA VIDEO: An undecided voter makes his choice in Charleston.

AMY ALKON: Feminism’s Franken-man.

THE RICK SANTORUM/MCLOVIN EQUIVALENCE:

A pretty close match, but the Nigel Thornberry guy is closer.

ER, BECAUSE PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU’RE A BLOGGER? Why Not Wear Pajamas All Day?

SO SOPA IS MOSTLY DEAD, but the Feds’ raid on MegaUpload demonstrates that there are still issues. Now thousands of people have lost their personal, non-infringing files as a result of the raid. Related item here: How can the US seize a “Hong Kong site” like Megaupload?

SELECTIVE MEMORY: Prof. Joseph Campbell: ABC unaccountably excludes Bill Clinton from lineup of pols who led ‘double lives.’ “ABC News offered yesterday a risible lineup of two-timing politicians that omitted Bill Clinton, the philandering 42nd president, but included Thomas Jefferson, about whom the evidence of sexual dalliance is thin at best.”

UPDATE: Eric Boehlert rewrites history. Hell, that’s practically his job description.

PAUL RAHE: Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney.

When it comes to politics, I am given to wariness. I am inclined to suspect that the candidates are – how shall I say? – less upstanding and less principled than they at first seem, and I regret to have to report that my suspicions are usually borne out. The more I learn, alas, the less I generally find to like.

This applies to Barack Obama as much as it applies to his Republican opponents. When he has run for office he has been strangely fortunate His opponents often have “accidents.” Embarrassing divorce records, which were sealed by the court, somehow find their way into the hands of the press. You know what I mean.

All of this leads me to wonder whether, by chance, a political appointee in the Obama administration working at the IRS broke the rules, took a peek at Mitt Romney’s recent tax returns, and reported to David Axelrod or to the Great Prevaricator himself the fact that the fabulously rich former Governor of Massachusetts ordinarily paid his income tax a much lower rate than you or I do.

Do you think that I am being too suspicious? Is it an accident that the op-ed published by Warren Buffett applies so well to the prospective Republican nominee?

Were I the chair of the appropriate committee in the House of Representatives, I think that I would look into this matter. In Chicago, whence Barack Obama comes, no one would ever think a development so convenient for the incumbent executive an accident. In Chicago, there are no accidents.

It does fit Obama’s M.O. Then there’s this.

UPDATE: Reader John Etheredge writes: “Just wait until they have all of the medical records.”

MORE ON the problems with PolitiFact.

CHARLES MURRAY ON THE THE NEW AMERICAN DIVIDE. “People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality. . . . We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.”

This is the theme of his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, which the Insta-Wife is reading. It’s a sort of Moynihan Report for white America, which seems to be undergoing the same sort of cultural decline that black America did in the 1960s.

MORE OF THIS ADMINISTRATION’S LOUSY ENERGY POLICY: North Dakota Stuck Using More-Costly Railroads to Move Oil. “Right now, about 25% of North Dakota’s oil travels by rail. According to the CBS News report that ‘will increase exponentially with increased oil production and the shortage of pipelines.'”

UPDATE: Reader Jack Lillywhite emails:

And who has a big stake in Burlington Northern? A guy in Omaha named Buffett.

And by having TransCanada tie its Keystone XI to the border crossing approval you can’t get a segmented line from Montana to Port Arthur, TX that the Bakken field could tie into. That is the concept. A collector system named the BakkenLink runs down to Montana from ND and ties into Keystone XI (known as MarketLink). A twofer you might say.

So, in a way it is a Win-Win for Obama – He wins his Green base and his Crony Capitalism base. Pretty clever, eh?

They win, we lose. As usual.

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