Krulwich highlights the time zone with the most people able to celebrate New Years at one time: If you look at this world time zone map, one zone, which we’ve highlighted it in yellow has, as you can see, all of China, all 1.3 billion of ‘em, plus a hunk of Siberia, plus Taiwan, Hong Kong, the [...]

A new Des Moines Register Iowa Poll shows Mitt Romney leading at 24%, followed by Ron Paul at 22%, Rick Santorum at 15%, Newt Gingrich at 12%, Rick Perry at 11%, Michele Bachmann at 7%. “But the four-day results don’t reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. [...]

SaintPetersBlog correspondent Matt Lettelier is in Iowa for that state’s caucuses on January 3, 2012.  He has agreed to share with us his notes from the campaign trail.  It is New Years Eve here in the Hawkeye state and despite the low temperatures, the campaigns are really heating up.  I spent last night just northwest [...]

How much did social media shape politics in 2011? A lot, says Christia Freeland: What’s important to remember in hindsight is that one of the most provocative ideas of late 2010 — published just two months before a Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, posted his suicide note on his Facebook Wall, and three months before [...]

The latest from Iowa: The Des Moines Register Iowa Poll is out at 8 pm ET. Four years ago, as recounted by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe in The Audacity to Win: “Back at the office, our press staff kept refreshing the Register website. The Register poll never, ever leaks — which is very rare with polls — nor does the paper’s [...]

Gordon Chang predicts the fall of China’s government in the coming year: As a result, we will witness either a crash or, more probably, a Japanese-style multi-decade decline. Either way, economic troubles are occurring just as Chinese society is becoming extremely restless. It is not only that protests have spiked upwards — there were 280,000 “mass incidents” [...]

Americans are hopeful for what 2012 will bring for their families and the country, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, though most say 2011 was a year they would rather forget. Nearly seven in 10 say the year gone by was a bad one, more than double those who consider it a success, according [...]

Some of Rick Perry’s campaign advisers “have begun laying the groundwork to explain how the Texas governor bombed so dramatically in a race that he seemed to control for a brief period upon entering the race in August,”Politico reports. “Their explanations for the nosedive come against the backdrop of a campaign riven by an intense, behind-the-scenes [...]

Michael Rosenfeld questions the boomerang narrative: Census data show that what is really new about young adulthood is the percentage of young adults who live on their own. From 1880 to 1970 the percentage of U.S. born women in their twenties who lived on their own (not with parents and not with a husband) was always less [...]

Robert Reich is the latest to predict — “based on absolutely no inside information” — that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden swap jobs, giving President Obama a new running mate in 2012. “Why do I say this? Because Obama needs to stir the passions and enthusiasms of a Democratic base that’s [...]