Newt Gingrich continues to lead in all the national polls but we are starting to get the first signs that his incredible surge over the past two months is starting to fade. Over the past week Gingrich has been dropping steadily in the Gallup national daily tracking poll of the GOP primary.

It’s been a busy few weeks at Occupy Tacoma. We can’t thank you enough for your second package filled with thermal underclothing, fleeces, jackets, hats and facemasks. The weather has been hovering in the 30′s all week, and so many occupiers have expressed their sincere gratitude for the extra warmth your donations provided them.

Thanks to Citizens United and a subsequent court decision, Super PACs can raise unlimited sums, and spend it all advocating directly for or against a candidate, as long as there’s no coordination between the Super PAC and the candidate’s campaign. But this prohibition against coordination doesn’t really have much significance in the real world.

The Obama Administration, expecting that we’re in an age where the normal rules of politics apply and not an age of nullification, nominated two labor officials for open slots on the National Labor Relations Board. That board will see previous recess appointments expire at the end of the year, leaving it without a quorum and unable to function. The two appointees would fill the Democratic spots on the board.

In a welcome development, Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has posted a strong statement of support for equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

In a stinging report, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released their findings of a two-year investigation into Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, showing that he unfairly targeted Latinos and discriminated against them at the expense of other crimes in his jurisdiction, including sexual assault crimes.

Union made OccupySupply jackets keeping Keith Reide & many of the other occupiers in this Erie Times-News video report warm.

While multiple recent polls have found Newt Gingrich leading in dozens of states, Mitt Romney has managed to retain his big lead in New Hampshire.

In a ceremony known as “Casing the Colors,” the US military formally ended their mission in Iraq, with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on hand to make things official. The location of the ceremony gives away exactly how this war is ending, and it doesn’t read “triumphantly.”

Standard economic models show that tariffs cost jobs. The reason is that they make consumers pay more money for the protected product. This pulls money away that could be spent in other areas. If the spending took place elsewhere, it would create more jobs than the additional money earned by the protected industry.

The same logic applies to increasingly stringent protections for copyright, except the economic waste and resulting job loss is likely to be much larger. Tariffs rarely raise the price of products by more than 15-20 percent. Copyright can make items very costly that could otherwise be available for free or nearly free. This implies a tariff of several thousand percent or higher.