As we approach the Nevada caucus, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have both pledged to contest the nomination until June. Gingrich's strategy is to forfeit caucus states, essentially giving a boost to Santorum and Paul, while preparing to compete in large conservative Southern primaries in the coming months. A review of the delegate apportionment rules set by each state reveals why this strategy is unlikely to work and why the Gingrich campaign is challenging winner-take-all rules in Florida and making legal challenges to Virginia's ballot.

Delegate apportionment in large states Romney is likely to win (New York, Massachusetts, California) heavily weight their delegate slates towards the victor . Large states likely to go to Gingrich (Georgia, Texas) will divide their delegates without as much weighting towards the victor. This means that if Romney and Gingrich win New York and Texas respectively by the same margin, Texas could award twice as many delegates to Gingrich as they do to Romney while New York could award Romney nearly 6 times as many delegates as they do Gingrich.

The Gingrich campaign's failure to make the ballot in Virginia, a state that heavily favors him, delivers Romney a large slate of uncontested delegates he would not win otherwise. Virginia's delegate allocation rules heavily favor the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district, meaning that Gingrich lost a change to not only win a delegate-rich state, but to win it by a large margin and mitigate Romney's similar advantage in aforementioned states such as New York and Massachusetts. Romney will likely win around 40 delegates from Virginia. As one of the largest states to favor Gingrich, this is a setback that cannot be recovered from in a protracted campaign.

All of the winner-take-all states heavily favor Romney. Romney has already won Florida, among the remaining are : Arizona, Puerto Rico, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Utah. The comparative advantage Romney will enjoy over Gingrich from the winner-take-all states, the differences in delegate allocation among proportional states, and Gingrich's Virginia ballot disqualification means that Romney could lose the national popular vote while still enjoying a comfortable enough lead among the delegates to secure the nomination. Even if Rick Santorum were to drop out, Gingrich would see the largest gains from his abscense in caucus states that tend to allocate their delegates more evenly according to the popular vote. If 100% of Santorum's support hypothetically went to Gingrich, the extra delegates would still not be enough to let him catch up to Romney. This scenario is unlikely as polling suggests that Romney would benefit more from Santorum's exit than Gingrich due to his supporters high priority on moral and family issues.

While it is technically true that Romney will not secure enough delegates to win the nomination until June, no one will be able to catch up to him at any point and the structural advantages he enjoys will ultimately win him the nomination. Ironically, John McCain benefited from the same rules in 2008 which prompted the Romney campaign to see the writing on the wall and drop out in February.

Update (3/3/12): While Gingrich was given the role of the leading "anti-Romney" candidate when this was written, the numbers are tracking very close to the projections if Santorum and Gingrich are swapped.

References:
2012 RNC Delegate Summary, RNC Counsel Office
RealClearPolitics - 2012 Republican Primary State Polling

The Korean Central News Agency, the propaganda arm of the DPRK, published this video to their website. While most of it consists of residents of Pyongyang wailing in grief, they choose to finish off the video with interviews of North Korean citizens pledging their loyalty to Kim Jong-Un.

North Korean media seems to be placing even more emphasis on supporting Kim Jong-Un as their new leader than they are on mourning Kim Jong-Il. It seems to be a calculated message directed at both their own people and at foreign powers attempting to downplay indications of instability.

I was recently looking at the Auraria Campus' plans to replace the surface parking lots surrounding the Tivoli Student Union with new buildings:
This is a great idea, as you can see the elimination of these surface lots allows for five new classroom buildings to be constructed along with a courtyard area. It also makes you realize how much space is wasted with these sprawling surface lots, constructing new parking garages and underground parking to replace them could allow Auraria to effectively double in size.

The Auraria Campus is hardly the worst offender. Looking at satellite images makes you realize that a massive wasteland of surface parking lots stretches along much of the area directly west of Downtown Denver. Between Auraria's far-flung west parking lots, Elitch Garden's seasonally-used lots, and the Pepsi Center's event parking there is a surface area that rivals the Central Business District.

This sheer amount of wasted space has always bothered me and I have highlighted the enormous area on the map below. How much development could take place here if these lots were consolidated into a few large garages?
View Central Denver Parking Lot Wasteland in a larger map

This panorama is a compilation of 91 photos taken in the Colorado State Senate chambers and stitched together using Microsoft Photosynth. The shutter speed on all of the photos was set to 1" at f/3.1.